How much (system) RAM does Daz use? (so I can avoid buying too much)

winduptoy

Hi.  Just curious, where would I stop getting returns if I'm adding system RAM?

magog_a4eb71ab

Depends on what you intend to use for rendering and how big you intend to make your scenes. I'm not sure when it comes to 3Delight, but for Iray, its generally recommended that for however much VRAM you have(or intend to have & use), you want to have twice as much system RAM. For 8Gb VRAM, you'll want to have 16GB RAM, just as an example.

Leana

For 3DL the recommendation would basically be “as much as you can” ;)

JonnyRay

This is similar to asking "How big of a pickup truck do I need to haul rocks?" Answer: "How many rocks are you going to want to carry?"

Magog's rule of thumb is a good starting point though. For Iray rendering, take the VRAM on your GPU and multply by 2 as a starting point. And Leana's suggestion of "More ... more would be good" when doing 3Delight renders is at least partly true as well. With any modern OS though, if you run out of physical RAM, it will swap memory to your pagefile on the HD. It will just be slower.

Also, are you going to dedicate the computer to rendering or will you want it to do other things simultaneously? I was trying to help someone recently with performance issues with Studio and then realized that while a render was happening, they were typically either swapping over to watch Youtube videos or starting up Photoshop to work on some 2D projects! 16 GB is a good starting size for Iray and an 8GB video card. But if you're going to ask the machine to do more than just run Studio, some additional RAM may help.

The other thing to keep in mind with RAM is the architecture of your motherboard. Pay attention to how many memory channels it has. Let's say you have 8 RAM slots and the MB has 4 memory channels, you would be better off to have 4 x 4GB memory dimms than to have 1x16GB or 2x8GB. Even then you'll want to pay attention to how the RAM slots on the MB are combined into the channels. For instance putting the 4 sticks into slots 1-4 may only be using half of your RAM throughput.

L'Adair

winduptoy said:

Hi.  Just curious, where would I stop getting returns if I'm adding system RAM?

When it comes to system RAM, my personal rule is, "More is better."

When I bought my "The Beast," I got 32GB of RAM. I paid more to have those in 2 sticks instead of 4, so I had the room to upgrade to the full 128GB the motherboard will hold without having to toss any RAM I'd already paid for! I later added another 32GB, and that's when I learned my mb was set up as JonnyRay mentions above! (Oops.) I bought that second 32GB of RAM because Catalyzer, (LAMH,) is a RAM hog, and DS kept crashing when trying to do two animals in one scene. After the upgrade, I can render two animals with Catalyzer hair just fine.

(The new Strand Based Hair is based off of Garibaldi, much like LAMH, and may also require a good deal of RAM, though I haven't proof of that. Maybe JonnyRay will know.)

So now I'm running 64GB, but just the other day I started looking up RAM prices, to see if I could maybe budget another 64GB and fill up the mb. (I actually have a scene that is so big, it can cause errors with OpenGL and things disappear from the viewport.!)

Anyway, the information in the posts above mine is all good, solid info. But my advice is to buy brand name RAM, match the speed of the new RAM to that of the old, and buy as much as your budget will allow.

Ivy

L'Adair said:

winduptoy said:

Hi.  Just curious, where would I stop getting returns if I'm adding system RAM?

When it comes to system RAM, my personal rule is, "More is better."

 But my advice is to buy brand name RAM, match the speed of the new RAM to that of the old, and buy as much as your budget will allow.

Yup You can never have enough & in this case more is always better .