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AE 7 does not see all of my RAM ?!!?!?
I have a G5 dual 2.5 PPC, I just recently upgradedf from 2.5 gigs of ram to 4.5 gigs ( i now have four 1gb sticks and the two 256 sticks that came with my machine).
When I launch AE 7, on the start up screen it says so and so percentage of 3.0 gb of Ram.
Also when I render AE tells me it is only using a percentage of 3.0 gigs?
Can anyone tell me why this is and if there is any way to fix it?
By the way when I check my memory in “About This Mac” the dimms show up and thier status says ok…
Any help would be greatly appreciated as I bouht this ram to speed up AE!
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2 Replies
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No application on Mac OS can address more than about 3 GB of RAM.
Here’s the deal: OS X is a 32-bit operating system. 32 bits means the maximum amount of RAM that a single process (ie, and application) can address is 4 GB. Additionally, OS X requires applications to reserve a certain amount of memory space for OS-related functionality, so the maximum comes down to 3 GB.
So this is correct, AE can only address a maximum of 3 GB of RAM on Mac OS. Why have more than that in your machine? You can run multiple applications at once, and they can each access up to 3 GB. So you can let Photoshop and AE hum along at the same time.
How do you get Mac OS to get past that limit? You don’t, not until Apple releases a 64-bit version of OS X. Feel good that you have a Mac anyway, because Windows XP limits apps to 2 GB, though you can force it up to 3 GB with a registry hack (which has been known to cause stability issues from time to time). The 64-bit version of Windows XP can address a LOT more memory, allowing each application to access something like 16 GB of RAM. AE is not optimized for 64-bit, however, so even then it hits the 32-bit ceiling at 4 GB.
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Thanks for the info. That makes sense.
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