So, I just noticed that DS gobbles up a ton of RAM when the render begins (in the example I'm currently using, it was a total of almost 8 gigabytes). But, by 89%, the RAM use listed in Task Manager is under 1gigabyte. That seems counter to my understanding of how DS would render the image (i.e. it refines the image as more and more iterations are completed, as opposed to early Poser renderers that rendered an entire chunk one at a time and then moved on.
The render in question is fairly minimal. 1 G3F, some clothes and hair, a bed and a bunch of cube primatives made to look like she just finished shopping (weighted iray shaders on those cubes). Any way, I'm just curious if anyone knows what that initial grab of RAM was all about and how DS got away of releasing it over time. I wasn't watching when istarted but long enough to make sure it wasn't going to crash. The reason I was watching in the first place was because the same render was killed by windows, presumably due to running out of RAM. It's total usage was just over 8 gigs last night, but wasn't terribly different from the max that I saw this morning before going on about my business.