playing with the memory setting doesn’t seem to do much either. 3GB is registering with my comp, just not giving me the jump i wanted in ZB (had 1GB before). i’m running XP Pro 32-bit. i was maxing at about a workable 7.5 million polys, now i max at about 9.5-10 million, i know that isn’t bad but it could be better. thanks so much for responding!
The 32-bit version of Windows XP will only recognize 2GB and spare change.
i thought Microsoft said 3.5GB, besides Windows says i have 3GB but if i watch my ram usage zbrush compacts my memory at 1.3GB even if it’s set to 2048.
A 32-bit version of Windows will only assign a maximum of 2 GB of RAM per application. The rest is reserved for Windows itself and other programs that you might be running at the same time.
To have ZBrush use more than 2 GB of RAM, you need a 64-bit OS. That will allow ZBrush to use up to 4 GB of the system’s RAM.
Don’t mean to hijack or anything but I have read the above posts and still have a similar question/issue with other particulars.
So I’m trying to get to level 7 of my mesh which equals to about 7.9 polys so I can get some nice clean fine detail which is pixelated at level 6. The only thing is when I divide it to level 7 it becomes a lot more unstable; when I hide some of the mesh to work on specific parts and do any masking that involves blurring, for example, sometimes zbrush (3.1) will just crash. Other issues include a 15 second memory compacting after every undo and another 12-15 seconds of the memory compacting after my first brush stroke imediately following an undo. This has been making sculpting at this level to be very tedious and frustrating. I understand that with a 32 bit machine I can only use 2GB of RAM to any process while Windows itself reserves the remainder. The thing is, I get the impression that my machine still should not be experiencing such severe lag. Ive spoken to several people who use Zbrush and they are suprised to hear that I lag so bad at under 8 million polys with 3GB of RAM. Here are my system specs:
XP Pro SP3 32 Bit
Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 @ 3 Ghz
3 GB of RAM
239 GB remaining on C: where zbrush 3.1 is installed
Nvidia GeForce 9800 GTX+ 512 MB
Here are my preference settings in zbrush:
Compact Mem: 750
Doc Undo: 3
Tool Undo: 3
MaxPolyPerMesh: 10.92
HD Preview MaxPoly: 6
With Task Manager open to monitor mem and cpu usage the MOST I ever see my PF Usage go to is 1.74 GB with Zbrush being the only application running; I end all the processes that I know are not needed at the time (so as to not create instability). I have swept for viruses, spyware, and malware and come up clean. I have Kaspersky 2009 Anti-virus running in the background at all times; should I disable it? I don’t know what else to do. I guess the question is are my issues expected with my given specs or is something fishy going on?
Thank you very much in advance.
You should set Compact Mem to 2000. The other Preferences settings look good. Thanks for sharing those, because that helps.
You also need to make sure you have a good chunk of free space on the drive where ZBrush is installed, and make sure that the drive is defragmented.
Beyond that, try scanning for spyware. Also, do you have a lot of stuff installed in your ZStartup folders? The more that’s there, the more overhead which in turn will reduce your capabilities a little.