Someone has complained to me about how much ram Adobe Photoshop hogs and how he has to set aside a swap file for the culprit to prevent problems rendering?? Geez, I always thought Poser was the biggest ram hog so I'm kinda surprised to hear this?? Anyone else had similar experiences?? Is Adobe Photoshop and its kin really that hungry for ram???

It really, really is! It will use all the RAM you can give it, of course depending on the image sizes you're working with. It also needs a swap file about three times the size of the largest image you want to work with. If it ever crashes, you'd better be sure to look for that temp file and delete it, because it can take a CHUNK of your hard disk space and it will stay there forever if you don't manually remove it. I have an Intergraph workstation and it's old now, but I got it so I could work with images. As prices on things came down, I added more RAM, a second processor, a 9Gb Ultra-SCSI HD, etc., and Photoshop uses whatever you give it. Some of the people at our company are using it for aerial photo work, files 1Gb in size. They have workstations with 2Gb RAM, 4 processors, and their own RAID array. Gromit

Oh my, and I usually have both Photoshop AND Poser running side by side?? Explains why I get those nasty runtime errors in Poser every once in a while; Poser certainly does NOT like to share its' ram with anyone else either, let alone another ram hog?? You know, I really was not enlightened to this till now about Photoshop?? Does that mean that the more ram you have, the faster and the bigger Photoshop will render??? Just curious? ~3D ;-)

Well, strictly speaking, Photoshop doesn't do renderings, at least not from 3D to 2D. However, if you have enough RAM to work with your images without having to page out to the hard disk, many operations will be faster, sometimes a lot faster if your hard disk is relatively slow. Processor speed will affect it, of course. Photoshop is a multi-threaded application, so it will take advantage of multiple processors. Not all applications will be affected by multiple processors unless they're designed to do so. Now having said that, you can configure Photoshop to use as much or as little of your RAM as you want it to. Gromit

Thanks for the tips! ;-)

3DSprite Photoshop (on the Mac anyway) requires 15 - 20 MB RAM for the program PLUS 3 to 5 times the RAM size of the picture in order to be able to do everything in RAM (there are at least two filters that MUST have the RAM or they won't work at all! They are the displacement and lighting filters). If that much RAM is unavailable, PhotoShop will attempt to use the hard drive (or whatever drive you have specified in the preferrences) as RAM. The more RAM you make available to it, the less time you will spend watching the little progress bar inch it's way across the screen. I personally have allocated 250MB RAM to PhotoShop and most operations happen very quickly (average picture size is 7MB - 20MB). -Jim

Guess I had better stop sharing Poser with Photoshop then eh?? Wow!! Both of these programs seem to require a lot of ram!!;-)

3DSprite: On the Mac, at least, running more than one program at a time is an exercise in faith (and, often, frustration!). That's because the OS doesn't do any oversight on RAM allocation (OS-X is supposed to remedy this). On the Mac, each application is supposed to abide by the OS guidelines on RAM allocation and usage and if they don't, you get system error message 11 (usually) and the system crashes. For that reason alone, I almost never run two applications at the same time (except for printing something). Unless you have a really old computer, it doesn't take very long for PhotShop (or Poser) to initialize, so switching back and forth really isn't an issue like it used to be. If you're running NT on a windows machine, then you have true multi-tasking (both applications are REALLY running at the same time) and it might be worth doing, providing you have lots and lots of RAM. Otherwise, I prefer to allocate as much RAM as possible to each application and put up with the switching hassles. -Jim

Thanks for the info! ;-) It helps.