Memory Prob

[Kibble]

Hi all

 

 

dose anyone get windows appear in max that says

"The system has not enought memory. you should free up some memory and retry. if you choose to cancel, the application may become unstable"

 

 

i'm at the moment i'm using 78 megs of textures, and i have 4 gig ram.

also tried bitmap pager

 

so don't really know why this is coming up.

 

any ideas

 

Cheers

 

Dave

[BunGHoLe]

Well I guess the message appear because you run out of memory...

I'm unhappy to inform you that even if you have 4GB RAM it's not neccessery fast. I read about it in a hardware site and I'll try to explain it to you. The RAM collects the information in rows. The more RAM you have the more rows you will have to store temporary information. But this information needs to be send to the CPU and when the CPU requires an information, the RAM needs to send it. Imagine it as a milk man who needs to deliver 10 bottles of milk to 10 houses in a neighbourhood of 1000. The milk man will need lets say 15 min to find all of the houses in the neighbourhood. But if he needs to deliver the milk to 10 houses in a neighbourhood of 4000 he will need 1 hour to find the houses.

So if you have many rows the RAM will need more time to find the specific information that is required from the CPU. Here come the timings of the RAM which acctualy make it fast. The size does not make it faster but the timings do. The less timings your RAM has the faster the milk man will deliver the milk before it's spoilted.

The cheap solution is to reduce the textures. Convert them and you won't run out of memory. And even if you make super HQ textures they will show off only when you make a very close up shots.

If you are a hardcore you can spend some money on new memory. Something from the OCZ Pro or Crossair series with big capacity and very low timings. The prices are smth abouth 1000$ but I'm pretty sure you won't need to buy them...just convert your textures and you'll be happy.

[Kibble]

well when i was looking for ram i went for teh EEC vesion was thinking this would be a good choice to go for.

 

what do you me convert the textures? make them smaller? there jpgs at the moe have to say they are about 2-8 megs each. but was thinking this wouldn't a prob.

 

the good things is now i just found out i have to render a smaller image so i can get away woth less detailed images

[Matt Clementson]

Unless you have used the /3GB switch in Windows then not all of your 4GB RAM will be accessible to MAX. There is a Windows limitation of only 2GB RAM per application.

 

Also be aware of the limitations of the bitmap pager - it only works well on uncompressed image formats (TGA, BMP). Compressed formats like JPEG still cause full memory to be allocated to the image rather than just the block needed.

[Verma]

Are you using Mental Ray for this rendering?

[landrvr1]

what do you me convert the textures? make them smaller? there jpgs at the moe have to say they are about 2-8 megs each. but was thinking this wouldn't a prob.

 

the good things is now i just found out i have to render a smaller image so i can get away woth less detailed images

 

You can save the jpg images in Photoshop as 'best' instead of 'maximum' - with no real visible difference in quality. The size savings will be significant. I just took a 415k file and saved as 'best'. The size is now 176k. 40% the size of the original. If you resave these images and still have a memory problem, at least you know it's something else.

[Matt Clementson]

You can save the jpg images in Photoshop as 'best' instead of 'maximum' - with no real visible difference in quality. The size savings will be significant. I just took a 415k file and saved as 'best'. The size is now 176k. 40% the size of the original. If you resave these images and still have a memory problem, at least you know it's something else.

That only changes the FILE size of the texture, not the size it is when expanded into RAM. The only way to change that is to reduce the number of pixels and/or reduce the bit depth of those pixels.

[landrvr1]

That only changes the FILE size of the texture, not the size it is when expanded into RAM. The only way to change that is to reduce the number of pixels and/or reduce the bit depth of those pixels.

 

Doh! What was I thinking??!