Minimum RAM Requirement should be 1GB

[James Murray]

For what it's worth...

I have been running AC9 on the PowerBook described below throughout the beta period, 1GB of RAM. Runs fine. Sure, the G5 is faster. (8.1 is slower.)

Long story short, I had one of my 512 DIMMs go bad this morning, took it out. I'll be running on 512MB until early next week.

Not fun.

Working in plan is no problem. If I rebuild a section window, even a small, simple one, AC hangs until I quit ALL other apps except the Finder. Then AC snaps out of it and finishes the rebuild.

Moral: The real minimum is 1GB.

Waiting on the FedEx guy,

[Dwight]

money ain't for nothin'

if you were poor, you'd make smaller images, but really complex models where lots of RAM is essential for any processing aren't good learning tools because the grunt work necessary gets in the way of creative exploration.... so it is probably better to stick with simple stuff.
Get a larger display instead.

[Dwight]

RAM comes to play in two ways:

-- containing the assembled "model," as a crystal, not a parametric list.

-- containing the texture data and lighting maps - ray-tracing, phong shading, whatever....

once you make a rendering situation that goes beyond this RAM on hand, your unit writes to disk and slows the whole thing down - sometimes it simply can't calculate a solution because too much data must be swapped....

learning happens in interesting situations. I only really learn under financial pressure, like this current assignment.