Hello a while ago I posted a thread relating to using over 6 gig of ram (i was having difficultys) and now I am not! I created an animation recently and it got to frame 200 or something like that and crashed ... out of memory error. Someone also tought me to set the amount of cores that vue uses down to 7 rather than 8 and with that extra core I can use the likes of poser, watch movies etc. Then I thought if I free up two cores I may be able to open another instance of Vue... sure enough I could and there was not a lot of slow down either. So now I create a scene with Poser and Vue on two cores whilst rendering on the other 6. Then the strange part... I decided to render on both open Vues at the same time (enabling all cores on each instance) and it worked much better than I thought In fact both render at almost same speed as one (animating not still pictures). Now my ram usage is at 5.5 gig and I feel I am using my rendering time much much more efficiently now and almost all my ram.

Here are stats:

1 render 9.5 mins
2 renders 11.5 mins for both same scence!

If I try to enable 4 cores on 1 instance and 4 cores on the other it goes much slower but if I set both to use 8 on each it works fine.

My next step is to try 3 or 4 open renders I was hoping that someone else renders in this way and if I was to have four instances of a render open (if my ram will cope) what would be the most efficient way to set the cores?