Quote - It was always my understading that RAM has nothing to do with Rendering.

Ram has everything to do with rendering. In addition to needing to load and handle all of the polygons, and textures to render a scene which eats up ram, you need to have ram to calculate shadow maps, calculate rays and bounces, and actually hold the bit map of the image(and images can eat a lot of memory uncompressed - multiply height by width then square it for each level of color depth to determine bytes).  In addition, you need ram on top of all of that to serve as a swap area for all of the number crunching and calculations (think of it as a scrap pad).  If you have insuffient ram, your computer will start using the pagfile on your HD to make up for the difference, which will slow your render down to a crawl - even with some of the fastest HDs.  This is always how 3D rendering has worked and used ram, since the earliest days back in the mid 80's.

If you are running 32 bit OS or Poser, then it will only be able to take advantage of 2 gb of actual ram, and up to 2gb of additional swap (if your computer and bios are configured properly).  One way to give Poser more ram to render is to render in a seperate process - this allows just the number crunching and bitmap image to take advantage of up to 2gb, while all of the object and texture memory is in the process with the initial Poser executable.

If you have Poser 7 Pro and are running a 64 bit OS, you should always render to a seperate process, as Poser 7 Pro has a 64 bit firefly implementation that will allow it full access to your ram for rendering.  Poser Pro 2010 on the other hand, has a 64 bit native executable, which is even better in the long run.

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