Here is a graph of my system memory from Task Manager.

Each bump is a render. The wider the bump, the longer it took to render. The higher the bump, the more memory was being used.

The first bump is with MSR=1 and Polygon Smoothing turned off in render settings. Quick and small.

The second bump is with MSR=.5. Slightly taller and wider.

The third bump is with MSR = .05. Twice as tall (twice as much RAM used to render) and it took 4 times as long.

The fourth bump is with MSR = .05 and Polygon Smoothing enabled. Now the RAM needed skyrocketed in the beginning, when Poser was doing buckets near the horizon. As it moved lower it was no longer including so many polygons in a single bucket, so the memory use dropped.

If you were using a ground prop with MORE polygons, not less, it would actually use less memory. The problem is the micro-polygons are built for an entire real polygon. So if you have big real polygons, you have many more micro-polygons, even if the bucket size is pretty small.

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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)