moskitos anyone?

[Juraj]

Well I am not saying it was 12 in those case, really could be 6, but, more on this level to illustrate :- ).

The geo itself isn't everything, if lot's of hi-res textures were used to drive shaders that can bring the ram amout alone much higher (let's say 8-10 materials, each with 3 4K textures atleast).
But the models  I had in mind that I can't find at the moment had internal stuff (like motor, electronics, drive stuff,etc..) also.
It's just if one car could fit, other couldn't, it doesn't make a well versatile solution to these companies either. So they might just as well stay with CPU, which I think most are.

[lacilaci]

Well I am not saying it was 12 in those case, really could be 6, but, more on this level to illustrate :- ).

The geo itself isn't everything, if lot's of hi-res textures were used to drive shaders that can bring the ram amout alone much higher (let's say 8-10 materials, each with 3 4K textures atleast).
But the models  I had in mind that I can't find at the moment had internal stuff (like motor, electronics, drive stuff,etc..) also.
It's just if one car could fit, other couldn't, it doesn't make a well versatile solution to these companies either. So they might just as well stay with CPU, which I think most are.

I think this debate is useless untill someone who actually been through this interferes.. :) I get your point. I think my 32GiB ram is useless atm. I think 64GB is somewhat ok and ideally you should get dual xeon with a 512GB ecc ram.... cause scenes get easily huge with geometry and textures and so on, and especially if you want to render that at 8K or more... But my point was that gpu rendering marketing is agressively aiming especially at those unoptimized ports of product/car/airplane models to get it rendered in an "unbiased" fashion right off the bat, with some nice hdri and no complex GI solution.. and a customer buys that if the client pays enough... that's all.. It's not about efectivity just about speed.... and people still buy it.. and only god knows where nvidia will take this... potential is great cause we already know what can be done, and i don't think gpu computation will forever be memory bound.. and maybe keymaster will be able in time to use that gpu power to speed up corona.. but the differences between gpu only and cpu only will not change in near future I guess... I would not use it now.. But I just understand that some people have some use for it.. Again if your client pays for that investment into your four titan setup graphics card and for the electricity bill why wouldn't you use it??

[Juraj]

I got bit lost there...I'll just leave it as is :- )

[Captain Obvious]

Frankly, RAM is cheaper than artist time spent optimizing scenes. If you can justify it (and the machine supports it), you might as well install hundreds of gigs of memory.

Every hour you spend cutting out polygons or reducing image dimensions in order to render a scene is an hour that could have been spent modelling more details or perfecting the lighting more. Just buy the additional RAM. It only costs a pittance anyway.