I began a thread ages ago asking if it is possible to use more than 6 gig of ram . 

Then I began displacing things. I have 6 gigs and on average use 5.9 gigs of it. If I added more displacement  to the scene I am sure I could increase this much further... thus I am reinvesting in another 6 gig of ram. Me and a mate are rendering a project and he only has 4 gig of ram.... and that is his motherboard maxed out ....

Is there  a way to turn displacement off and maybe lose some of the quality but still keep the shape that displacement creates?

It is an object that looks like a normal boring ball undisplaced and looks like a ribbed funnel when displaced (looks very cool) .

The only advice I can give to him is upgrade to an I7 also .... but is there a way where he can render with just the 4 gig?

If you set the quality boost in the displacement settings to -3 it renders a lot faster. I think this will be easier on the RAM too (not sure)

Note that although you set the quality boost to -3, you really can't see a difference in quality loss.

I think you may have the answer here, simular to reducing the quality in light settings.  On the forum postings about vue 8 I saw an option for allocating ram to displacement. Does 7.5 have this ...... I am not in front of pc.

If you have Infinite/xStream, you can bake the displacement.  Then it will be higher poly count, but displacement won't be needed.

Thanks Baking has just solved all my issues and it actually looks just as good I can'tthank you enough. I am just rendering a baked version of my scene about 30 times quicker!!! my mate is happy too an i7 is a bit pricey -  Thanks heaps