Well lets put it this way. ALL jobs i have done this last 3 months have all used up 5-6 gigabytes of memory when I went to render (and usually students wasete more memory than old timers not the other way around). All of them use 4 gigs when iniside maya. So with 1 gigabyte your kindof limitted in terms of whatyou can do:
in the amount of polygons you can push, quite severily. No 1 mil polygon models forget it, try forget 100,000 poly models too.raytracing is memory dependent, so expect not to use most raytracing stuffs out there at peak performancesevere limit in the kind of textures you can use in viewport, and you must really turn all textures into bot/map before render to get anywhere (a 4k texture uses up 64Megs without any accelerant, so ~8-10 textures later your memory is up, but you also need the scene in memory and the output buffer, undo and so on)dont expect to be doing ANYTHING for printDont expect to be able to have your 2D program open next to your mayaA empty maya with nothing else loaded eats 200 megavbytes of memory, having the manual open in a browser plus barebones os eats atleast anoythe 100-150megs leaving you with ~650 megs to work with. Each 100,000 polys collapsed eats 64 megs of memory, without any rig, no undo etc.My point is maya complete costs something like 2000$-5000$ depending on where in the globe you are, that means your expected to be able to have a computer that costs atleast that much! Memeory isnt all that expensive after all. with 100$-200$ you can get 2 gigabytes of ddr3. Now investing that little on something that will ultimately limit you for 7 days a week frm now on is not much of investment.
Also i havent really had a computer with 1 Gb of memory since the mid 90's (and no i was still in school back then). Nowdays even just for windiows 2Gb is cosidered minimum.
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how system requirments evolved with 2008 and 2009,
Well they have dropped support for older quadros, but hey taht was expected no way youd buy a quadro 1100 today. But yes this is their minimum requirement list on 32 bit:
Windows: Intel Pentium 4 or higher, AMD Athlon 64, or AMD Opteron processorMacintosh: Intel-based Macintosh computers2 GB RAM2 GB free hard drive spaceQualified hardware-accelerated OpenGL graphics card, means:
- Quadro Fx 5800,4800,4700x2,1700,3700,4600,5600,1500,3500,4500,4500x2,5500
- AtiFire Pro 3D v8700,v5700,v3700
- FireGL v7700, v8650, v8600, v7600, v5600, v3600, v7350
Tough certainly you could get by with a very high end gamer card if you can accept glitches. But forget support.
Three-button mouse with mouse driver softwareDVD-ROM driveSo if you really cant get more memory, then turn off undo, or make it one step only undo and wok without history on most of the time. You wont learn the nuances of maya use that way but at least it runs okish.