Any 1 how much ram should i be using for Blender…what is the recommended amount for me, Im using a Mac 700 mghz processor…I do pretty well now but for my bigger projects it slows down alot alot. so if any 1 could help that would be great. thx
if it slows down a lot… you want more…
Normally 1Gb should do you fine.
The answer to that question has been the same since 640k was the cap on the 8086XT/ATs… As much as you can afford, as much as the system will recognize.
If it’s a 32-bit OS, you’re capped at 4G total… that’s 4G TOTAL, including swap space. So if you stuff in 4G, disable swapping. Or if you stuff in 3G, cap swap file to 1G. etc.
64-bit OSs are a different beast, but your money would be better spent on getting a modern processor besides a 700MHz anything. A P4 dual core 950 3.4GHz 800Mhz FSB is about $350usd, and it’s equal to a small pile of that Mac you’re rendering on. So don’t get crazy with buying RAM for an outdated machine. (but hey, it should be really cheap.)
How about as much as you actually need? I’ve got 2GB but very rarely go over 1GB.
For applications like Photoshop you should have around 2 Gb at the moment, for Blender it depends. If you use a lot of highres textures, than 1Gb is no luxury, otherwise, you can get off easily with 512 Mb I think.
heh, you want to do fluid simulations? I tried it on a 512mb machine, and it just about killed me to do anything intence. Took hours to simulate.
MicWit
Hey, so you’re an efficiency expert. Most of us aren’t. And we’re doing other things, like having elys… err, blenderartists open on another desktop, Gimp or Photoshop open and editing textures, etc.
1G on a dedicated rendering station might be fine, especially for simple scenes, but I can assure you I frequently go over 1.5G and have things start swapping out. I hate that.
Besides, that was much more important when 16M SIMMs were $400 each. For just over $100 a gig you can get the fastest, most stable, most overclockable DDR2 PC2-6400 DIMMs made… and next week they’ll be $100, and a couple weeks after that, $90… Assuming you “only” need 2G, that’s still only around $200.
Let’s assume you have some old clunker from… uh, a couple months ago… So you don’t need that, but just PC2-3200 (DDR2-400)… which today is around $69 a gig. Not slacker RAM, fast, kickass, low-latency and rock-solid RAM, $70/G.
How about what you need? I stand by my original statement. Buy what you can afford up to the max of what your machine/OS can handle.
kk thanx abunch guys.!
There is a simple way to reduce the amount of memory Blender uses: make it render frames in parts. Although there is a slight computational overhead, it is free and could actually speed up rendering on a machine that is low on RAM. The controls for this are located under the oversampling options in the scene buttons (labeled “Xparts” and “Yparts”). Just make sure you don’t have more than 64 parts in total - Blender doesn’t seem to like that.
I know this is nitpicky and annoying, but try to use MB instead of Mb or mb when writing. 1024 Mb == 128 MB, which is not a good amount of RAM.
To be standard compliant, we should use MiB instead of MB. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_prefix#IEC_standard_prefixes
On a side note: raytracing thrashes the RAM. RAM is made for random accsess, but nothing is as random as raytracing. That being said, I’m thinking that on a G4 700Mhz your limiting factor is going to be the FSB (front side buss, or the speed the processor talks to the memory at). The older macs (sub 1Ghz) had really bad FSB speeds. Around 133Mhz. That means that your processor may be running at 700Mhz, but it can only read at 133Mhz. The new Intel Macs run at 800Mhz, the G5 and AMD 64 systems run at 1.6Ghz, and I think some are up to 2Ghz on the FSB. That may be somthing to consider. Upgrading the ram may help if you have zilcho ram right now (< 512MB) but any higher on a system that old is not worth it, imho.