So I have a Toshiba laptop amd athlon x2 at about 2.00 GHz and two gigs of ram. So my question is should I buy 4 gigs of ram, or a 3d mouse from 3Dconnexion. also does that mouse even work with blender? and will i see a noticable boost with more ram?
How much ram do you currently have?
Ram won’t “boost” your rendering speed. It will allow for more lights (if you are using buffershadow) and more object to be put in memory during the render. My most intense scenes takes between 1 and 1.5gb of ram to render. And, these consit of dozens of lights, and millions of polygones.
Ram will “boost” your render speed if your works actuallty use more memory during rendering than what you have because when an application, like blender, need more memory than there is, it needs to swap memory information between the ram and the hard drive…which is very slow. If you have more ram, it will prevent this from hapenning and hence accelerating your render.
Altho, you already have 2gb of ram, so go for the mouse. I’m pretty sure you won’t use the whole 2gb of memory you have right now. And anyway, blender has a maximum of 1.5gb of usage under Windows…so that lets a good 500mb for the operating system and background apps. Plenty of space for blender. As for the spacenavigator mouse, there is a version of blender that is compatible, hell i believe spacenavigator made a built themselves available on their website.
hope all of this made some sense o_O
alright sounds good but… does any one own a 3d mouse? is it worth the money? does it actually work? and would you recommend it???
I have a space navigator. It’s nice, but a bit un-comfortable with blender because of all the key shortcuts, makes you take your left hand off the navigator… i did some large architectural scenes where using it in "fly " mode felt really natural though and was a big help…
using it with sculpt mode is also really nice too when using turntable mode…
For my tastes some of the axis were round the wrong way, so I changed that in the source code
There’s loads of potential and according to the sunday meeting agendas there’s some improvments to ndof in the works
I’m working on a toolbar that’ll mean a lot less key shortcuts, AND that’ll be really nice with the space nav but hey. (check out the tablet pc thread if you’re interested
what OS are you?
If you already have 2 gigs of Ram on linux you’ll generally be good… On Vista you may want more, but if the OS is only 32 bit you’ll not get more than about 3.25 gig available
Thanks for everyones help so far, and I’m running vista 32 bit.