Effects of RAM on rendering time

[jeffroyer 0]

I am considering increasing my ram from 1gb to 2gb to increase rendering speed. Does anyone have a sense of how much this will really help? If it is only 10% it might be a little tougher justifying the cost than if it is say 40%.

thanks

[panthony 0]

Jeff,

I just upgraded to 2gb from 1gb (PC not a mac) and have not seen a really substantial increase in speed. However I am now able to render much larger images for greater detail one after another.

[Jonathan Pickup 241]

I have 2 Gb in my macbook and 3 Gb in my other machine. But I didn?t notice an increase in rendering time, not due solely to the ram anyway. But with all that memory changing applications is quicker.

One thing that did speed up rendering times was having enough free hard drive space. One of my renders was taking over 2gb of HD space, when i only had 2 free. That caused some speed issues.

[grant_PD 226]

You will find that your system has better response with more RAM. Meaning you can go work on something else and not have the computer get all chunky on you. Also, as stated above you can do larger and more renderings without having to restart your system to clear the RAM. This is a big drawback of batch rendering. By the time my computer gets to the last rendering on my cue, it's out of memory and stuff takes forever. I wish that wasn't the case.

[jeffroyer 0]

thanks for the feedback!

[rcandsb 0]

"without having to restart your system to clear the RAM"

I am rendering single images on a Mac Dual 2 GHz G5 with 2.5 GB RAM. Do I need to restart my computer each time to get the best performance? It renders fine for high polygon count scenes using open GL, but it never finishes the scenes in Renderworks with Shadows, and sometimes not even in Fast Renderworks.

Would it be more likely to finish these renderings with more RAM?

Thanks.

Coburn Bennett

WGBH Educational Foundation

[RonMan 9]

Please note that you may not actually have to reboot the system to clear up RAM usage. Very often, just logging out and in again will fix this problem. The RAM usage is usually YOUR processes not the systems. Logout and login usually clears this up.

RonMan

[cad@sggsa 0]

Good day all

Iam having a 'lack of memory' and 'out of memory' problem when I do any kind of render in any view on a drawing.

Iam currently running Intel Core 2 CPU, 6600 @ 240GHz, 2.40GHz 1.97GB of RAM and a 80 gb hard drive with 66.8GB free space. I work trough a server with a 186GB hard drive with 174GB free space

My rendertime also has been extremely long(85min) on Final Renderworks renders - which I need to use to view the Gobo textures.

Do I need more RAM?