Mac users - memory settings?

[Kristen]

Hi, all. I've been trying to find the ideal memory partitioning for VW and for printing renderings. I have 512 MB RAM. Right now I have VW set to a minimum of 42000 K and pref. 128000 K, and the plotter set the same. But the balance is not quite right for printing renderings reliably. Also, what seems to be an ideal setting for virtual memory? Thanks!

[Guest]

Kristen, Depending on what types of applications you have open besides VW and what types of drawings you are render, rendering mode, complexity, etc. will all determine your mem allocation settings. Each person will have different memory settings.

If you are rendering with what you have set and youa re getting out of memory errors or error type 2, you will need to increase the preferred. I would increase it in stages of 25k at a time. I don't think I've ever seen anything that requires more than 200k for the preferred. That was only because of the number of lights and complexity of the drawing the person was using.

Generally the polygon rendering will absorb more memory to render and time as the complexity of the objects increase. RenderWorks rendering modes are about constant as the complexity increases.

If you have 512 built in memory and are not running other applications, you shouldn't need to have VM turned on. Even if you have it on, and are running other applications, you shouldn't need to have it on. VM will slow down your system overall performance including rendering in VW.

[Kristen]

Thanks, Katie

I seldom get actual memory errors where VW freezes. What happens is that the rendering will sometimes stall partly finished and I'll get the message

"One or more operations was aborted due to lack of memory size. Increase partition size."

The program doesn't freeze or anything; I just can't render until I reboot the computer. This happens even when I've set the VW memory partition to 200000K.

The rendering is fairly complex -- lots of textures and symbols, but only one light. (Rendering the model with the DTM is especially tricky, but I have problems even in files without it.) VW will be the only program open, and the rendered drawing the only file open.

The other memory problem I get is with the plotting. Once I finally get it rendered, I'll try to plot it. The file is processed very quickly, and has a very small file size -- and prints out incorrectly as a sort of cubist-looking patchwork of the rendering.

Boosting the virtual memory pretty high (800M seems to work) seems to solve these problems, but as you said, it slows things down considerably. That's why I'm looking for tips on setting my memory partitions, because I was hoping that 512M would be enough RAM to not have to mess around with virtual memory.

[ 09-30-2002, 09:21 AM: Message edited by: Kristen ]

[Guest]

What type of printer are you printing to?

What version of OS 9 do you have?

Do you have Carbon Lib 1.6 installed?

Ad for the file that is running out of memory when rendering, this may be associated with a bug in the rendering engine we use. Could you send that file to me at tech@nemetschek.net attn Katie?

I'll take a look at it and see if I have a solution for you.

[Marc]

You know once I was getting those cubist kind of print outs too.

I realized I had set my printing dpi in Doc Prefs_Raster Render menu to 1.

I changed it to 360 and everything was fine.

I've never used anything more than 80000 for preferred and generally use 50. If it's not enough I bump it up 10k at a time.

M

[Kristen]

The plotter is an HP DesignJet 800PS.

I have OS 9.1, and I'm using CarbonLib 1.6.

It isn't any one particular file that's giving me problems, just any file that's pretty large and detailed. I'll see if I can send you a file that's been troublesome (not sure what firm policy is on that).

I checked my Doc. Prefs. -- raster render was set to 300. I think I will try bringing my VW mem. partition down, and raising the plotter's memory, and see what that does for me.

Thanks, again.