Quote - Also, the problems I have are with 0.05 Shading Rate. If I use 0.20, I have no problems but the earth ground texture won't look as sharp as 0.05.

That makes sense. You are experiencing the same thing I did with the noise node and displacement - micro-polygons are created based on the Min Shading Rate. More precisely, the Min Shading Rate roughly specifies the area of a micro-polygon. Actual shader evaluation happens at the vertices of the micro-polygons.

When you make the Min Shading Rate .05, you're saying you want roughly 20 micro-polygons per pixel in your render. That means all the geometry you see is cut up into millions of tiny pieces and these tiny pieces are evaluated.

Do you have smoothing enabled? Smoothing will trigger micro-polygon displacement, even if you have displacement turned off. Smoothing with a very low shading rate results in an enormous number of micro-polygons.

Now, the micro-polygons are only built on a per-bucket basis. That's why decreasing bucket size can reduce the amount of memory you need.

Suppose you have a bucket size of 32. That's 32 by 32 pixels, or 1024 pixels in each bucket. Now with MSR = .05, you have at least 20 * 1024 or 20480 pixels per bucket. This doesn't sound like much. But when you have a single polygon that is much bigger than the bucket is (from the cameras point of view) then the entire polygon is cut up, even though not all of it is needed. So if you have big wide polygons, Poser actually makes a lot more than 20480 micro-polygons for a given bucket. It could easily make millions or tens of millions, depending on the geometry.

When you view these polygons across a landscape, many more of them fit into a bucket vertically, so many more are cut up. Let's say you managed to arrange your viewpoint so that 100 polygons are visible in a single bucket that includes the horizon. These 100 get divided into 100 million micro-polygons. Each micro-polygon is 36 bytes, so now you are into 3.6 GB needed to hold them just for one bucket. Poser dies.

This is similar, though not exactly the same as my test of a single one-sided square, rendered with an extreme zoom. The single polygon effectively gets exploded into the equivalent of a 100K by 100K render, of which only a tiny piece is actually needed for a given bucket. Poser dies.

By the way, a single naked hairless V4 with Morphs++ loaded and no textures on her consumes 36 MB of RAM, according to Task Manager. Kawecki likes to suggest things to try, but he doesn't try them himself. I suggest you pay attention to what I'm telling you.

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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)