"Vegas can't see more than 1Gig of Ram for preview purposes"
That's The Q.

Is it possible that each of the "cores" has one GB allocated to it? If you bring up the task manager, what does it report?

Physical Memory (K)
Total 2094420
Available 1688472
System Cache 208344
BTY, Autodesk Combustion Is able 2 c the 2 g ram.

Microsoft has a designed in limit to the amount of RAM Windows XP can access. There is a switch available to increase the total RAM allocation. You need to go into the boot.ini file and modify the following line:
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /fastdetect /NoExecute=OptIn
modify as follows:
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /fastdetect /3GB

The complete description of this switch is here:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;319043

I find myself explaining this a lot these days just for practice.

Windows, and all 32bit OSes, have a finite pool of addresses sufficient to map out 4GB of RAM. However, the addresses must be used to reference RAM memory, graphics cards, printer ports, whatever. Everything uses an address and because of this a 32bit system will never be able to address a full 4 GB of memory.

Normally, Windows limits a program to 2 GB, and if I'm reading this microsoft bulletin right, it sounds like programs are usually designed to limit themselves to 2 GB as well.

The bulletin describes a startup switch to allow programs to use up to 3GB but warns that allocating 3GB to programs at startup may prevent some drivers from loading--specifically, graphics drivers that need a big block of addresses to reference a graphics card's onboard RAM. The solution is a further switch that allows you to set a custom memory limit above 2GB but below 3 GB.

All of this is tangential to the initial question, which is "Why does Vegas limit me to 1GB for my RAM preview?" I can't really tell you how this works, whether it is calculated at startup, or if it just comes from a table. My own system with 1 GB installed has a ram preview limit of about 760 MB. So maybe if you set up windows to allow more memory to programs, Vegas will have more memory for the RAM preview. Or maybe not, if Vegas itself is limited to 2GB.

What I can tell you is that if you set the Preview RAM limit too high Vegas 6 will start to swap your preview data out to the page file and then Vegas' preview will slow to a crawl. If you see this happen you should lower your preview RAM setting. Maybe if you raise Windows' overall limit the OS will be less inclined to swap out your preview RAM.

Rob Mack

The "/3gb" has not effect on vegas

+

The Same Ram Limit On Windows XPro x64 Bit

No, XP64 does not have the RAM limits. XP64 can see and use in the Terabytes.

I know that for RAM preview in Vegas, Vegas has allowed me to set it as high as 4gb. I have 6gb on my XP64 system.

If I remember correctly a single app can address up to 4gb of RAM. That's saying that the app wasn't programmed to address no more than 2gb which many 32bit apps were.

I addressed this with Sony and Dennis Adams sent me this reply.

"We intentionally limited the range of this because people were cranking it up much to large and it was impacting performance of the system. Also, it turns out on a 32-bit OS you can run out of address space sooner than RAM, depending on the types of allocations, which was causing other problems when DRP was above 1.5G or so. Rest assured, the RAM in your machine is being used, just not all by DRP."

hope this helps.

cheno