[SOLVED] How much RAM?

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#1

Hello everyone,

I’m buying a new laptop soon and I’m trying to decide whether to get 16Gb of RAM or 32Gb. My family’s desktop computer only has 2Gb and there is a lot of stuff I cannot do, so I want quite a bit more in the laptop.

For everyone with 16Gb, how often does blender crash because of not enough memory? How high can you get the resolutions of water and fire simulations, and how high is needed for realistic results? What are you doing when you would need more memory?

I’m going to college so I will have this laptop for quite a few years. The upgrade from 16 to 32Gb costs $150 - $400 more depending on what company I’m buying it from.

#2

Im no expert but the more you have the better it is. Don’t know about blender, how much memory is blender allowed to use. Im mostly a Modo and 3ds max user.
Be sure that you have a good processor and Graphic card. And lots of ram (for the future) Thats my opinion

I have a laptop with Intel i7-2720QM processor. Nvidia GTX 460M graphic card and 8 GB of ram. So far no problem. But I only do rendering anyway and I am satisfied with that. Dont know about simulations.

#3

I have never run out of memory with my 16GB of RAM. Not in blender nor in any other application.

#4

only 2GB XD
but I can make cool things with Blender :stuck_out_tongue:

#5

2GB is what I would consider bare minimum if you only want to work with Blender as somebody else here.

4GB is actually fine, but if you go to 8GB you are also more free to have much larger render files and also have other applications open at the same time.

So it comes down to if you want to multi task the laptop or not, also try to make sure it has a decent NIVIDA card in it and no AMD.

16GB is more than you need and 32GB I think is a waste.

#6

16GB is more then enough. Even with some pretty big scenes the most RAM i’ve used hasn’t even been 8GB.

When you’ve got about 8GB of RAM, the processor becomes the main slowpoint for water/smoke/physics simulations, even with an i7 it still can be slow as there’s a lot of number crunching. 32GB of memory is not going to help.

#7

If blender sculpting is among your needs…
The more ram the better it is. Multires modifier is a RAM eater (among some other modifiers)
I use 24 GB or RAM, being able to sculpt on 25 millions quads, baking them on a low poly mesh. Even 100 millions is possible.
I mean, maintaining excellent smooth performance.
That’s not possible having 6 GB of ram, for instance.
Blender loves RAM. Lot of it.

#8

Ive got 32GB clocked to 1600mz and Ive never used more than 12GB (even when doing high res simulations). My advice would be to get 16GB clocked to 3600mz.

#9

Blender shouldn’t crash at all, assuming you’re not using a 32-bit version and have enough virtual memory available.

To everyone who believes they have “enough” RAM: Try disabling virtual memory and see how far you can go without your system complaining. I can easily fill up 12GB from just running two browsers, a few PDFs, an IDE and Blender (plus some background stuff). If you want to maintain a responsive system, the more RAM, the merrier.

I wouldn’t go for the expensive (high-clocked) RAM - with todays CPU caches it makes little difference at a much higher price.

#10

In my understanding, 1600 MHz ram speed already provides more than enough bandwidth for the new quad memory channel configurations. Buying the more expensive high speed ram designed for über overclockers and enthusiasts is waste of money and doesn’t bring any real performance benefits.

16 Gb is enough unless you want to try some very heavy simulations or turn up the subdivision level to super high numbers etc :slight_smile:
In “normal” use you just won’t run out of it.

#11

True if you are at the level of Michalis the more the better!

#12

Thanks everyone, I’m not going with more than 16 then. I don’t expect to get into any super heavy sculpting anytime soon.:smiley:

The 2Gb is just so pitiful when it comes to rendering simulations or any file with more than 3 textures that I thought I would need a lot more.

#13

I know how you feel with only 2GB,

I run windows XP 32-bit with 2GB ram clocked at 533MHz

It’s usually fine, but with too many particles it crashes. It runs exceedingly slow if there are too many faces / verts in a scene.

#14

Hi, I have 16 GB of ram, and when I’m working on my material (with a lot of geometry), Blender goes none responsive and crashes after some time, and just after Blender crashes all other windows (like Google, Discord, Steam, etc) also goes none responsive and crashes. While it’s doing that I can see that my ram and SSD have 100% percent usage. It can’t by SSD because I have A M.2 NVMe SSD and probably not my graphics course I have an RTX 2060(say it cause I don’t have any software to monitor my graphics card), so I’m thinking it’s because of my ram
Should I invest in more?

Note: It’s because I have a subdivision up to 10x, for me Bump in my material. No it can’t go lower because then it looks trash

#15

Hello BL4STER,

First: you can’t have too much for Blender - the RAM just set the limitations…
Second: For every count of subdevisionincrease you will have 4 times the faces…
(for example - if you take a count of 10 instead of 2 you have 4^8 (=65.536) times more faces… means 65.536 the RAM)

Because of your “100%-usage-problem”: I’ve experienced that the “Hard-Drive” size and speed is also important… I’m using 80 GB RAM (at 3.200 MHz) and an extra 500 GB SSD just for Simulation Cache and I had the same problem. I noticed that my SSD was at 100%… after changing my simulation-cache-drive to a 2 TB the problem was solved…

The 2060 is a great GPU (using it too in one maschine) … notice that you will have problems when require to acces to much data in a single frame, because of the “just” 6 GB VRAM… that is the reason why I switched to CPU rendering at this station…

and when possible - try to reduce the amount of subdevisions :wink: