Can Leopard address more than 2 gb ram in Pro Tools?

[AMMusic]

I'm thinking about switching to mac because of the RAM address limits PC has on everything. Not much support from anything for 64 bit windows, especially PC. I don't know much about Leopard yet so I'm curious if its 64 bit. If it is, can Pro Tools use 4 gb of ram for itself (if I had, say, 8 gb ram total) or is it still the same. I know some 32 bit PC programs (sonar) can do this running on 64 bit vista. Thanks, kind of a noob question.

AM

[Ziko]

OSX leopard is 64bit, the OS can address more than 4GB of RAM (I'm not sure what the limit is, but it's huge)
Pro Tools is 32bit, so Pro Tools (and any RTAS plaugins/VIs running inside Pro Tools) can address a maximum of 4GB.
So if you had for example 6GB of RAM in your machine, OSX might take say 200 Meg when "idling" and then when you open Pro Tools it will be able to consume a maximum of 4GB out of the 5.8GB left.

Leopard, being 64bit, does not have the 2GB user RAM limit that 32bit Windows OS's have (this limits any user initiated application to a maximum of 2GB in total).

[AMMusic]

You just made my day , thanks for the quick post.

AM

[sunburst79]

You can however nearly double PT's RAM usage under Windows by using the /3GB switch. This will let you go from a max of 1.6GB for PT to 2.7GB. The increase in RAM alleviates most problems.

[docbop]

All OS's have limits. OS X limit is 4GB physical and 4GB virtual for every app and process. An app like PT spins off lots of processes and all your plug-in's are separate processes so they each get 4 physical and 4 virtual. Window default I believe is 2/2, but as the other poster pointed out there are boot options to increase what Windows will use.

[Jperkins]

So are you guys saying it doesn't really pay to have much more than 5 or 6 GB of ram for running Pro Tools LE in Leopard??
I have 5GB and was thinking of getting a little more.
When I'm mixing the CPU is only at half but it seems like the mouse response is slower and less responsive so I thought some more Ram would smooth things out...
just curious.

[evs]

i´m really curious, everybody says that you should have much ram as possible. i have 5gb, and believe me, before i had 1 gb of ram. there was NO difference i could tell. not more spedd, better performance, nothing. just the about my mac showing me that i have 5 gb of ram.
but i don´t use samplers, so maybe this could be the reason..

(on the other hand, i just kept the extra 4gb of ram, cause you never know..)

[AMMusic]

Thanks guys, I'm aware of the 3gb switch in windows, but its a great excuse to tell my wife so I can get a mac, have wanted one for awhile. I use Mixosaurus drums in the Kontakt 2 player. My small kit uses 1/2 gb ram and if I try to go with a kit with more hit variations, it kills my system in a heartbeat. I want something with as much ram as possible. I'd stay with windows if Digi would make a 32 bit version of PT that would work with 64 bit windows, like this one is with mac. But I've wanted to try some apogee converters as well, which don't work with windows. Either way, win win for me.

AM

[Ziko]

The /3GB switch I'm afraid only works with applications that are PAE compatible (PAE stands for physical address extension) which is only a handful of applications like Exchange Server, SQL Server etc.
I've never checked whether Pro Tools for Windows is PAE compatible but I'd be very surprised if it is. Unless you find documentation from Digidesign that says it is, assume it isn't, it's that rare.
Unfortunately it's all too common for people to use the /3GB switch thinking it'll make a difference when actually it doesn't.

As for each VI getting its own 4GB of RAM, that depends on each VI creating its own process and I've watched the processes on my Mac while launching plugs-in effects and VI's and no new processes have ever launched. It all appears to run under the one process.

[AMMusic]

Originally Posted by Ziko

The /3GB switch I'm afraid only works with applications that are PAE compatible (PAE stands for physical address extension) which is only a handful of applications like Exchange Server, SQL Server etc.
I've never checked whether Pro Tools for Windows is PAE compatible but I'd be very surprised if it is. Unless you find documentation from Digidesign that says it is, assume it isn't, it's that rare.
Unfortunately it's all too common for people to use the /3GB switch thinking it'll make a difference when actually it doesn't.

As for each VI getting its own 4GB of RAM, that depends on each VI creating its own process and I've watched the processes on my Mac while launching plugs-in effects and VI's and no new processes have ever launched. It all appears to run under the one process.

There is a thread over in Windows section that talks about exactly how to implement the /3GB switch in Windows/PT and people have seen increases from 1.6-2.7GB. I don't really care about each VI getting its own 4GB, only that PT will be able to get 4GB total. Since it only sees about 1.7GB in Windows now, that would be a huge increase for me. I'd be able to use the full VI's that I want.