Dizzi is right. There are different answers for Poser 6 versus Poser 7 as to how much memory you need. P7 introduced a texture cache that supposedly means you use the same amount of RAM regardless of the number and size of your textures. Whether that really works right or not is questionable, IMO. Not sure. For Poser 6, that's definitely not the case and you have to consider the total memory needed by all textures. But ... P6 also has a render setting for Max Texture Size which will influence this, as it can shrink the textures before using them.

Despite what you were told above, polygons do matter. For example, a single figure comprising 200K points, connected up as 100K polygons, along with just 20 body morphs will consume around 138 MB. Put 10 of these into your scene, even if they are the same V4, and you are using 1.4 GB of RAM just for the base geometry just for posing them.

Then you have to consider the implications of rendering. For any given bucket, the polygons and vertices visible through that bucket are copied to the rendering data structures and moved from model space into world space. The bigger the bucket, the more of these are kept. If two distant figures can be seen in a given bucket, nearly their entire geometry is copied into the renderers data structures, sans morphs of course.  So decreasing bucket size has a significant impact on rendering resources. When you have chewed up a lot of RAM just for modeling/posing, there isn't much left to do the rendering. Poser 6 and 7 have a 2 GB limit per process.

However, you can expand your use of RAM by rendering in a separate process with P7. This means the modeling data does not have to share process address space with the rendering data. The renderer can have 2 GB all to itself just for world-space polygon and texture info.

We have to also consider the implications of displacement. You bring up an interesing point about looking across terrain at the horizon. Does your terrain use displacement? Then, bingo, looking towards the horizon will include a bigger percentage of the terrain geometry. The relevance of this is that Poser is a REYES renderer, and it subdivides your geometry into micro-polygons. The degree to which this can explode your RAM requirements varies with the geometry and viewing angle and the Min Shading Rate, believe it or not.

You mentioned nodes - nodes are cheap with regard to RAM. They are insignificant and you need not pay attention to node count. I have had no problem rendering a scene with various props collectively comprising 10,000 different nodes.

But when those nodes create displacement, and you get enough micro-polygons in a single bucket, RAM starvation is easy to achieve. When I was doing extensive experiments to verify this, I successfully crashed Poser using only a single polygon. I put a Noise node into the one-sided square hooked into displacement. I then shrank and zoomed the camera into it so I was like a tiny bug floating over a tiny but very detailed terrain. Crash, big time. But it looked cool before it died.

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Renderosity forum reply notifications are wonky. If I read a follow-up in a thread, but I don't myself reply, then notifications no longer happen AT ALL on that thread. So if I seem to be ignoring a question, that's why. (Updated September 23, 2019)