ok, in your example, Traci, you've said that i've chosen to render, chosen being operative...  is there anything, an add-on type app. or uh, i dunno [puts on blonde wig and bambi eyes] something that could tell me that what i'm wanting to render will eat up x-amount of um, GBs? and if there isn't, why isn't someone out there not creating one?  hehe

I don't know about Cycles because I haven't used it.  Now, Octane does tell me how much of the memory on the GPU I'm using but only AFTER I've started the render.  I think there's part of the python script that comes with Octane which will give you a texture count before you start rendering but I'm going on memory here as I am on a different computer - a laptop that can't use Octane because it has an AMD card. Octane and iRay only run on NVidia video cards.

So if SM enables GPU rendering will they be limiting Cycles to NVidia video cards as well?  Making 3 render engines a lot of folks can't use........not seeing much business sense in that.