Hi all 

just a question on memory 

I am currently running 4GB in a rather odd configuration at the moment 2x1GB 1066's DDR3 and 1 1600 2GB DDR3 however I have discovered a intresting deal for 16GB spilt as 4x4GB DDR3 1600's sticks now I am intrested to know what sort of improvement this would have on poser the other question if anyone has any previous knowledge on them sticks all read vengence.

Cheers all

I have 6 4GB DDR3 1600's (vengence) running now and they work great.  Since the i7CPU  limits the ram speed to around 1333 ( I don't remember the exact speed) it really doesn't make much difference.  Even if you put ram 2000's in your computer they will run at the slower speed because of the CPU limit.  The only way you can get them to run faster is with overclocking and that can be very tricky if you are not used to it.

But, just increasing the ram will help.  The more ram you have the better.

Quote - The more ram you have the better.

In the interests of avoiding confrontation, and because I believe you probably know better, I'm going to ask you to explain that.

For example, would you get more speed if instead of 24 GB of RAM, you had 24 trillion GB of RAM? How about 24 billion trillion GB of RAM?

yes because the more you put into Ram the less you put into your Swapfile on the Hard drive or into a readyboost device - neither as fast as Ram.

so if a scene hits 5gb and you have 4gb Ram, windows will write 1 gb to the Swapfile on the HD. more ram avoids that.

basic Windows operations.

Correct use of the word "IF"

IF your current bottleneck is a RAM shortage? The answer is YES.
IF your current bottleneck is NOT a RAM shortage, it will help banana's.

Sorry :-)

But I like banana's

It is a not well known fact but (at least since Vista) Windows considers RAM as a cache for the HD; this means that the more RAM it has, the more stuff it can keep available without hitting the disk, including whole programs. At very least, if you relaunch the program it comes up quicker.

In general you can have many applications open (e.g. you would have no problem in having Poser, Vue and Blender open, each with exacting content loaded) and, at the same time, handle much more data.

When I design my next computer (custom assembled since late 1990's) I always specify as much RAM as the mainboard can handle while I never go for the latest generation CPU or graphic card.

"It is a not well known fact but (at least since Vista)"

Windows 3 actually. not sure about Windows 2, I did'nt use that for long and I just glanced at Windows... Dos was better at the time...

You didn't answer my question. You put up a straw man and beat. I didn't ask if going from 4 to 5 was an improvement. I asked if you already have 24 GB, would 24 trillion GB make a render go faster and by how much?

Or let's say you have a 500 GB drive and 524 GB of RAM, so that your whole scene and all your entire hard disk are now in RAM.

Now you add another 500 GB of RAM. How much faster is the render?

The reason I said the more ram the better is that I tend to have multiple programs open at a time.  When I have PP2010 open at the same time as PP2012 I am sucking up a lot of ram.  When you drop out of ram into the swap file, there is a drastic slow down in the system.  If a person does not use much ram, then there is no reason to have it, but you never know when you will add someting new to your system that could use it.

Quote - You didn't answer my question. You put up a straw man and beat. I didn't ask if going from 4 to 5 was an improvement. I asked if you already have 24 GB, would 24 trillion GB make a render go faster and by how much?

 

what "straw man" ?

I gave you a clear answer. sorry you did'nt think it was the answer you want. could you tell me the correct answer you want then....? or do you just want to cut to an arguement...?

obivously you have a answer in mind... and sorry I can't seem to play the game you want? I don't seem to have a copy of the rules handy. oh and if you think I'm being obnoxious, I'm not.  I'm geniunely puzzled at what exactly you want?

Quote - Or let's say you have a 500 GB drive and 524 GB of RAM, so that your whole scene and all your entire hard disk are now in RAM.

Now you add another 500 GB of RAM. How much faster is the render?

why don't you just tell us instead of playing games?

Khai - what is your problem? It's a simple point.

Somebody who has enough RAM - not swapping, not starving for space for the other apps they want to run, will experience no benefit by spending to still more RAM.

With RAM there is such a thing as "enough". After that, it is not providing any benefit.

All I'm trying to establish is that I would prefer to that people who are asking for help on system choices be given accurate statements.

The bald, unqualified statement "more is better" is not accurate, except when "not enough yet" is the current state. Many people have 8 GB of RAM and all they do is portraits. Advising such individuals to get more, no matter what, is a disservice.

And a straw man is defined here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man

It's what you did. You transformed my argument into "4 GB is enough", which is not at all what I said.

I think if you're already at 24 GB, more is not better.

BB everybody loves you.  And you inspired me to run a test.  I loaded PP2010 and rendered a single image at 1920x1080 and watched the ram usage with RealTemp.  While it was rendering it was using between 94 and 97 percent of the available 24g of ram.  Before I started the render there was only about 10 percent of the ram in use, which means that while rending it sucked up an additional 85 percent of the ram.

Well, if you want hard statistics, I had 4 gigs of ram and put in two more gigs. Didn't notice a darn thing, but I'm sure I will when the time comes :P. If I had gone from 4 to 8 I may have noticed more, or not.

Hope that made sense...lol.

I never advise getting more ram just because you can if you don't need it. But if you use programs that really need it on a regular basis, then by all means...

Laurie

Did you say Real Temp? Where does it display RAM usage?

Are you talking about the "Load" field? That isn't RAM - that is CPU.

I used a tiny little program called Desktop Info. It sits on my desktop and feeds me information (because I'm an info junkie) and tells me the top process on the cpu, memory and page file. Very handy ;).

I circled in red the stuff having to do with CPU utilization.

The green graphs (blue in my Intel CPU Usage display) are memory use.

Real Temp has nothing in it about RAM.

Quote - I used a tiny little program called Desktop Info. It sits on my desktop and feeds me information (because I'm an info junkie) and tells me the top process on the cpu, memory and page file. Very handy ;).

I was responding to ToxicWolf who said Real Temp. I understand you know which is memory and which is CPU.

Sorry - Back to lurking ...

Is RealTemp like SpeedFan? That won't tell you anything about how much memory its using. I use Rainmeter, so I have little doodads that tell me durn near averything about my computer and what it doesn't, Desktop Info does. Most stuff I use takes much more CPU than memory, including Poser. Like I said above, I added memory and didn't notice much. I did recently upgrade my cpu and noticed immediately...lol.

Laurie

Please stay polite and avoid getting personal. No TOS violations, please.

CPU is like a car engine. RAM is like the cabin.

If you have more to carry and the engine is not powerful enough, more power will let you go faster - more CPU will render faster, always. (There is no speed limit in rendering.)

However, if you need to carry four people in the car, and you increase to an 8-seat car or 800-seat, either way you're not going to see any improvement at all.

Swapping is the equivalent of not having enough seats, and you have to make multiple trips.

My statements began with the premise that once you have enough RAM (seats) for every situation you care to deal with, then getting more is not going to make any difference.

The argument arose because it was clear to me, not only in this thread, but in others, that there is some confusion among "artists" of RAM and CPU.

It boils down to "I heard something with a three letter acronym is always better if you have more" and then mistakenly conclude that everything with a three letter acronym comes in better is more.

That would be fine, if more was free. More is not free. You pay for it - with real money. So telling people to always pay more is not nice when it's simply not the truth.

   If your projects are approaching your RAM capacity, then more RAM improves speed.  Where this "event horizon" occurs varies greatly, depending on the user's work habits.

     Most users would never top out a 4 GB machine, but there will be some whose niche interests push harder.  I tend to make complex scenes and render at large pixel dimensions using a lot of resource-heavy material effects (nods to msg24-7).  I have seen Cameron pull just over 48 GB during IDL precalc.  I frequently exceed 16 GB, but only rarely surpass 24 GB.

BB, do you recall where you got the bar graph CPU/RAM sidebar widget?  I have one that looks very similar, but can only display four cores.

edit:  Argh!  cross posted by BB whilst I was composing my thoughts...

Still nobody answers my questions. (Except seachnasaigh - crosspost) Sigh. I don't understand how Socrates ever accomplished anything.

So I'll answer them.

If you have 24 GB of RAM you are not swapping, and you've got no programs you plan to use that aren't already preloaded. Every program you have is preloaded and waiting to be called upon. Everything you have in your scene fits in memory with room to spare. You could load 80 figures and 150 props (using V4-type figures as an example at 100 MB each, and very complex props at 50MB each) and you'd still use only about 16 GB of RAM - 8 GB would be left unused.

So at that point I'd say without any doubt that more is not better, and is just wasting money.

Quote - Still nobody answers my questions. (Except seachnasaigh - crosspost) Sigh. I don't understand how Socrates ever accomplished anything.

So I'll answer them.

If you have 24 GB of RAM you are not swapping, and you've got no programs you plan to use that aren't already preloaded. Every program you have is preloaded and waiting to be called upon. Everything you have in your scene fits in memory with room to spare. You could load 80 figures and 150 props (using V4-type figures as an example at 100 MB each, and very complex props at 50MB each) and you'd still use only about 16 GB of RAM - 8 GB would be left unused.

So at that point I'd say without any doubt that more is not better, and is just wasting money.

For some reason, the morph brush seems to use a ridiculous amount of RAM. So I did make a scene with a single M4 and some clothing props, and between proserpro.exe and render.exe, it did max out at more than 9gb of RAM in PP2010 when I got around to rendering.

I suppose I could have just saved the scene after using the morph brush, reloaded, and then rendered. But I was too lazy. If I'd had less RAM, though, I'm going to guess I'd have encountered an error. shrug

I doubt that Plato bothered to record too many of Socrates' failures.

HiJack1

...put in as much ram as you can and make a ram disk :)  Well a long time ago when drives where slow and ram was faster, this used to be the speed trick of the day, and you could tell programs like photoshop to put it's swap files on the ram disk...You just crossed your fingers and hoped you didn't have a lock up, otherwise you lost a lot of time and effort :)  Been there and done that too many times to count back when some of you were probably still in diapers :).

No use for lots of memory?

...what about rendering a scene in which there is an alley bordered by tens (or hundreds) of statues of the complexity of the Thai statue from the Stanford 3D scanning project? even a single instance contains 10 million polygons (nearly 150 times a V4).

...or doing some fluid simulations with a 512x512x512 cell subdivision (130+ million cells, several gigabytes just to hold one instance of the structure).

Anyway, as I hold no shares of firms building RAM chips, I walk away from the latest fight. I really hope that this atrocious period will soon be over, because the conflictuality in forums has skyrocketed in an unbareable way (a couple of months ago I predicted in another thread problems and I was optimistic).

Bye.

Quote -    If your projects are approaching your RAM capacity, then more RAM improves speed.  Where this "event horizon" occurs varies greatly, depending on the user's work habits.

     Most users would never top out a 4 GB machine, but there will be some whose niche interests push harder.

That's because most users only render naked vickies in temples. I routinely ran out of memory when I was running on a 32-bit machine with scenes with four or five fully dressed characters with props.

With 24 GB in a 64-bit setup I did run out of memory with over 20 figures.

Why not do Poly count and texture management?

I prefer Lower Poly figures and structures, but with good textures and displacment maps.

Good displacement maps offer a lot more, and offer more flexible options, then then lots of Poly's.

It is the same issue for using a V4 (or any other dense mesh) with all high res textures for background figures where they will be rendered 2" high max.
Use lower Poly count as the figures/objects move further back in the scene.

Good poly count and texture management is the cheapest solution to RAM Problems.

I put effort into modeling with efficient polygon use, and make much use of displacement to add detail.  I often use (strictly convex) n-gons in place of several quads/tris.  I place a premium on low poly dolls, especially if they can also bend well.  But even with all that, many of my scene projects are resource-massive.  This scene is mesh (no backdrop) all the way out to Glaseye's sky dome.  I still intend to add two more filler tree species, plus a hedge/shrub species.  There are eleven dolls and two animal figures here, although squished down to this size you can't see them.

.

Quote - Correct use of the word "IF"

But I like banana's

On the topic of correct usages of things...the apostrophe you've added in "Bananas" is out-of-place, since it is indicating possession instead of plurality.  When making something plural just add the s without the apostrophe.