I have a Q6600 (quad core), 4GB of 1066MHz RAM, dual SLI video cards and 1.2TB of hard drive. Recently I've been facing RAM issues in Poser that might mean I need an upgrade: I have too many texture maps on my scenes.

Since each screen usually take at least 30 mins to render, what I do is: I set them up during spare daytime, and right before I go to bed I go to AMINATION / MAKE MOVIE, and set it to render IMAGE FILES. So it renders several frames of my scene while I sleep. Now, whats been happening is that when I wake up, Poser is crashed halfway, with a window saying it's low on memory. Usually when rendering several angles of the same scene, it will render several frames, but crash on the frame that focus on the horizon, where you can see a lot of the ground in an angle. When focusing down into the ground on an small angle where you can't see a lot of it, it won't crash. I assume that it could be because when its rendering a piece of the ground thats far in the horizon, that piece has a lot of the texture and the materials in it. (could it be?)

From what I understand (please correct me if i'm wrong), those 3D programs uncompress all your texture's JPEGs inside your RAM into 3 bytes-per-pixel images (RGB), so a 1000x1000 pixels image would take 3MB of RAM (1000 * 1000 * 3) even if on disk they take 20kb as a low quality JPEG. Also as far as I know, the renderer don't use HD swap, meaning that either you have enough RAM for all your uncompressed textures, or you won't render your scene. This is to improve rendering speed, because otherwise it'd take way too long for the renderer to get pixels from your HD swapped RAM. (not sure if it's entirely correct, please correct me if its not).

So, I have 4GB of RAM, which I thought to be more than enough for Poser and anything I could throw on it. Well, it's not. So I'd like to ask you guys:

1. How much RAM you have on your Poser computer? Do you run out of RAM on complex scenes? Were you having RAM issues that made you put more RAM, and did it solved the issues for good?

2. Any tips on how to get scenes to render when there's almost enough RAM?

3) Asside to texture maps, what else drains a lot of RAM? I usually have 3 texture maps on my main character, and a LOT of nodes on my material room. Everything from math (multiply, add, subtract...) to specular nodes, noise, and so on. Do these also consume a lot of RAM?

4) My motherboard supports 8GB of RAM, but if I put 8GB it will cut its RAM clock by half. Will this be a severe impact on my rendering times?

Thanks in advance for your advise!