Sorry for the late reply but for some reason the reply notifications just landed in my mailbox this morning(?)
Here are some observations and side notes:
The whole render was very memory intensive:
4 images used as source for seven shaders including 2 water shaders (with high opacity and translucency - don't ask me why, I'm only pushing faders
).
Added to that are 3 populations and 1 single of .TGO objects.
What I see is this:
Loading TG2 initially takes 50MB.
Loading this particular .TGD makes the mem usage go up to 350MB.
Activating the atmo and light in the preview ads another 40MB, slowly climbing to 50MB.
So now TG2 uses 400MB.
Selecting the atmosphere node ads another 20 MB.
Pushing 'Render Image' makes the mem usage go up to 1250 MB and slowly increasing. Every time a new square section of the image is about to render there is an abrupt increase.
The cloud layer was the last thing I added and changing that had no real impact on the scene. Changing the cloud layer settings was the simplest thing to do.
"
if you have sufficient disk space for the OS to use for virtual memory page files it shouldn't be an issue"
XP is running on a 50GB partition exclusively assigned to the OS, it uses little less then 12 GB including the 6GB used for the pagefile (this has a fixed value of min/max 6GB). Other software is installed on different partitions. And the two Terragens each have their own partition.
Oh, and then this: I installed an AMD fix two days ago and noticed the swap file usage display going from a 'saw tooth' before to a flat line afterwards.
