Quote - Note: my computer is such crap I have often converted morphed and posed figures into props to conserve memory in PZ3s before rendering! Again... Wish that was a built-in feature of Poser. I have upgraded Poser and I now miss the texture resolution on-the-fly down-sampling of Max Texture Resolution that was in the poser 5 Render Settings. It was great not having to make my own lower-resolution texture maps for everything my self... Could test render with low max texture resolution and then final render with the full texture with no extra work in Poser 5. Please remember in all this that I am not at all a sophisticated user. I come at this from traditional media and have a c.1995 understanding of computers. I liked my old WinDOS OS.

 

There are 2 different situations where you can run out of memory: In poser itself while posing or applying materials and during rendering. If you run 64bit poser, none of these two are an issue (if you run out of RAM it will just be slower).
In 32bit poser there is a limit which depends on your OS (2-4GB *). If you render in-process (so with external process disabled), you need more memory since both the render process and poser itself has to fit in the same limited space (2-4GB).

Now you have a little bit control over how much memory a scene uses. For the poser process you can set the texture preview size to a lower value (Render Settings!Preview)

In P8 and up the render engine uses a texture buffer the size of which is depending on your actual memory. It will be smaller if you have little memory. Theoretically it should now not matter what size the textures are. Having said that - it all has to fit in 2-4GB memory and if your scene gets larger, there is little spare room left to keep things going, but that would happen with smaller texture sizes as well.

 

2GB - standard 32bit Windows
3GB - 32bit Windows with Large Memory Switch enabled
4GB - 64bit Windows