How much RAM for Vue?
This is a question I frequently read on Vue forums, from users about to purchase a new PC. Vue has always been resource hungry and Vue 8 is more so than ever.
To make it short, the answer to this question is: as much as you can get.
When I started working with Vue 8 (beta), I tested various scenes I had made previousely.
One of them, titled Mad Gorges, made it choke. Vue 8 would crash every time I tried to render it, consuming all the available memory during the dynamic ecosystem population. My computer would then start to swap madly and become unrecoverable.
I have 8 Gb of Ram on my current machine, but in its original version this scene was 65 billion polygons.
Vue 8.4 handles it better and manages to render it fully in preview mode and in screenl size. But it consumes all the available memory(7.4 Gb for Vue alone) and I get a memory warning at the end.
This means that:
- the scene would need to be trimmed down to allow larger renders
- it would be impossible to run the standalone renderer alongside Vue with this scene
- swapping makes the render slower as the processors are not working at 100% all the time
Increasing my computer RAM from 8 to 16 Gb would clearly be the solution, but right now it is impossible because my mainboard only takes 8!
The moral of this story: when purchasing a new computer for Vue, give it as much memory it can take, you may always end up with a scene that will need it!
