You guys are going to laugh at me, here, but for the past 3 weeks I have actually been trying to use Poser 4 on an older Pentium with only 64Mb of RAM :-) As you probably could predict, it doesn't take too many custom morph targets or second/third figures on a scene before I run out of memory. Evolution/Eve was my first clue that my machine was woefully inadequate. I loaded her with what I considered "essential" MTs and couldn't even get the final poses done before the scene would crash and give me an "out of memory" warning. Then I actually bought Vicki, with her increased number of vertices. Hoo boy :-) Problem solved, though. All it takes is money. I have a new 750Mhz PIII on order with 128 Mb of RAM (and a 32Mb GeForce Graphics accelerator for the games I like to play). I wanted to go with 256 with Poser in mind, but I had to cut a few corners to fit into my pocketbook. I made sure it was expandable to 256 for the future. So my question is this - how much RAM are most of you running and what concessions or problems have you run into with your installed RAM? Is anybody using the new DDR chips? How do you think Poser will do for me at "only" 128 Mb? Will I be scrimping my pennies for an additional 128 here in a month or two after pulling whats left of my hair out by the roots? Marc

Well, I am using 256 Meg on a Celeron 433. I have not gotten an out of memory error but renders can take there time. My Xena model takes about 2 minutes from selecting render until it begins rendering. I use Windows98.

I've got a p3 500 w/ 128 megs of RAM.. Poser likes to slow down, especially if my comp's been on for a while.. Sometimes, I'm beginning to think that Bryce and Poser don't give back the memory when I shut them down.. I have to reboot to get any semblance of my normal amount of memory. I'm currently working on upgrading to 256 megs, but I'm having trouble getting Dad to remember to call his supplier, who has pretty good hardware prices.. Rosh

One thing to keep in mind: Win95 can't handle more than 128 MB, and really maxes it's performance at 64. Win98 and Windows NT can't handle more than 256, and work best with about 128. Win2000 can allegedly handle 1GB of RAM ,but I've heard it tops out around 256 or 512. Or so I've heard.

OK, you'll laugh even harder when you see what I have: 40 megs of RAM on a Cyrix processor!!!!! I've only had the out of memory warning when it tries to find a texture map that isn't there. Otherwise, I have no real problems. When I put more than two characters in a scene, it slows way down, but it doesn't crash on me. I guess I'm lucky. I'd like to have something bigger, but right now it's not in my budget. Melanie

Athalon 550 with a 16meg Creative Banshee Antique video card. Windows 98. No problems Ever Oops, oh yeah...256 meg of sdram 100 mhz. Buy memory right this minute mister, it's incredibly cheap at the moment ;) -Darth_Logice

Win 98, Intel Pentium III 500 mhz with 128 mb SDRAM and a Voodoo 3 2000 PCI video card (truSpace 4 website recommends a Viper II AGP). I'm usually okay, but Poser often stops working if I do too many renders in succession. (?) I don't have to reboot my system, just Poser. It's Photoshop 4 that really crashes all over the place, with only one duplicate layer -especially if I try adding a "noise" filter to the tiniest section. I don't know if that's a RAM problem. -Talos

UM...I've been running 384 megs of RAM for some time...well before upgrading to win98...win 95 will take whatever you can throw at it, thou before the latest version of 98 384 was the max for most PC's without NT.

Got you beat Melanie, in the "Whimpiest System" contest. 133MHz, 32Mb RAM, 1Mb video RAM. :{ However, with a Gig of HD headroom, I've never gotten any Out Of Memory warnings, (except the bug on the missing maps thing) just have to tolerate massive amounts of virtual memory disk writing (and those 45 minute renders).

Dual P3 500 with 352 megs ram, another 64 is its way. Win NT 4.0 tweaked for performance.

Win98 and Windows NT can't handle more than 256, and work best with about 128.<< Yikes, where did you get this mis-information? My Win98 net machine is running with 256 MB and I have 512 MB on two NT machines and 1 GB on another. I believe NT will address up to 4 GB. I recently got a dual 866 with 1GB and that machine flys. I'll be getting a dual 1 Ghz later this year and I can't wait. I laugh when remembering running 3D Studio 3 on a 486-66 and 16 MB's of RAM. That machine came with a "smokin" 256 k video card (256 colors - woo hoo) and a "massive" 120 MB hard drive. Combined with a 14" monitor it cost almost $4,000.

Dual 1GHz! drool....

Not maybe the best or fastest system around but I can not conplain much , I run 393 M 100 Mhz ram , on a AMD K2-6 450 mHz , next week it will be a 600Mhz, I pick out at 80 gig of HD space. thank goodness for CDRW and my backup CDR and zip drive., Not had any problems with any app Yet. Cross my fingers Eagle 4x4

Try one RAM for every 50 ewes :-) Sorry, but with a livestock market each Monday near where I live, I couldn't help it. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ More seriously:- (1) When are we likely to see the price of RAM come down appreciably? (2) When will PC's be able to have a gigabyte of RAM? (3) When till laptops be able to have as much RAM as desktops?

For people having problems with application which don't "give back" memory, there are small utilities like AnalogX MaxMem (i use it), a freeware : not memory consuming, but it frees a customizable part of your physical memory. VERY useful.... (you can find it at softseek.com)

I'm running 128Mb of 100Mhz RAM. ::Crosses fingers:: I've had no problems as yet Paul

I started out with 128MB of RAM on Win98, which was fine for simple images, but swapped like crazy with complex scenes. I just added another 128MB and it's now much happier.

Too much is never enough... G4/450 with 256MB RAM (expandable to 1.5GB). 256 is ample for Poser or Bryce, but not enough to run both together (which I like to do) with enough overhead to do what I like (y'kno... HUGE texture files...) -sk

I'm running on a p3 450 with 384 mb ram 32mb vidcard and 40gb harddrive space. No probs:) AR

P3 500 with 256 Mb RAM, Poser only ran out of memory once, whith PhotoShop open - as PS was set to take half the available memory I would guess that 128 Mb would be fine most of the time, but 256 (or so) is more better. I often run Poser and 3D Studio Max at the same time, make it simplier to check how your object mods are working.

A good rule of thumb. Load up your application(s), and start using them. If you notice lot's of disk activity (the hard drive light is flashing a lot, and little tick, tick, tick noises) while you are working, you need more RAM. Expect disk activity when you save files. But if you see constant activity, no matter what you are doing, you need more RAM. And if you're running Windows and have a buttload of little icons in your tray (the little thing that the clock is in on the start bar), then you should think about uninstalling some of that nonsense. A bunch of little background apps can suck your memory dry. -Nik

I oversimplified when I posted earlier, BTW. Win95/98 and NT Workstation experience diminishing returns with RAM above a certain level. In general, (for example) the only performance difference between a PC running Win95 with 128 MB and 256 MB will be the number of programs you can have open before slowing things to a crawl, while there will be a noticable increase in all performance between 64MB and 128. Windows will gladly use any memory you can throw at it, but it only uses a limited amount (depending on version, CPU type, etc.) of memory well.