I have Intel q6600 processor, 6GB of ram, and one animation to finish. Problem is, when I render it, can see used only 1GB of RAM, although my scene contains about 1 million polygons. I have 11 photometric lights with raytraced shadows and render in mental ray. It takes up to 11-12 minutes to render a single frame. Is that normal or have I gone wrong with some settings? Platform is vista 64bit and 2010 max 64bit. Please help.
The RAM just stores the numbers and values that the processor calculates. Its the processor that makes the biggest difference. I overclocked my Q6600 to 3.0GHz with a large cooling fan and it had a significant impact on rendering speeds.
I was reading posts where it takes hours to render a single studio setup frame.
Lower the settings if you are trying to preview effects, other than that, be patient.
Well Max uses as much RAM as it CAN as in max of 2GB in a 32bit environment. Plus other applications running might be hogging RAM. 1mio polys aint that much. And it's true that the CPU makes the biggest difference AS LONG as memory isnt saturated. If it is. the CPUs wont even get to be fully busy.