Terragen 2 crash on negative displacement again...

[Oshyan]

I'm intent on helping you avoid crashes that lose render time and cause frustration. I'd never want your renders to be longer than they have to be. If anything I'm interested in the results being discussed here as they could inform development around optimizing the renderer and caching scheme.

500MB is not much considering everything that can use memory, from objects and textures and terrains that are loaded, to image and antialiasing buffers (separate from render buffers, as far as I am aware), to populations, and more. By all means use whatever render buffers work for you and give you the best render times, I just think it's a dangerous *assumption* to make that a 2048MB render buffer size is a generally good practice. I know for my part it's impractical to use a buffer that size on the vast majority of my scenes, but mine may be more complex than yours.

More than anything I simply want to avoid unnecessary crashes for you and anyone who follows your example.

- Oshyan

[Henry Blewer]

I have noticed less memory use since I loaded Windows 7. This may be because the OS is not loading its whole into memory. Everything I have run, games, Blender, Terragen 2, Corel Paint, FireFox, etc; has worked much better than with Vista or XP.

[neuspadrin]

As Oshyan mentioned theres many things that can be loading into memory. You have to remember terragen needs access to more memory then just the renderer.  It has its entire ui, anything you load in, etc. 

Also are you running the /3gb switch (though that isn't very wise considering your max is 3gb)? If not 2048 is the LIMIT of terragen's access, when it still has tons of other pieces that need memory.  So you need to approach it more like:

2048 - (memory terragen ui is currently taken) - (chunk of memory for objects etc) - a lil more just incase giving a buffer = safe subdiv cache.

And even if you use the /3gb switch, with only 3 gigs of ram I don't think it really does anything as it still will reserve 1 gig for kernel before giving ram to a program - which would only be 2 gb which wouldn't make the switch do anything. 

One way to save yourself a little memory, is if you have the paid version you can run the render with nothing up by console mode, which will give you a few more megs the ui usually would be taking (i think, would need to see).