Thank you for these insights Brian !
The actual geometry etc only needs to sent to there renderer for the viewport or final render, so doesn’t have to live in Blender’s memory.
It might not be needed for many users, but a huge improvement for studios.
What would prevent this from working as a generalised solution ? i.e. any time the scene is bigger that half the available RAM, it is exported to USD, offloaded from Blender and rendered through Hydra. Couldn’t this basically double Blender’s RAM cap ?
@jason-apple @Michael-Jones-Apple With M1’s unified memory architecture, couldn’t this even triple the memory cap if the scene can be directly read from the memory pool ?