Memory Limit for free tier?

[robbistron]

Good morning! New to the forum, but been using sharpcap for about 3 years now.

I am running windows 10 on my laptop with 8gb of RAM.

memory.png (37.64 KiB) Viewed 99 times

Sharpcap says that the maximum allowed memory limit is half the system memory or 2gb. Since I have 8gb ram, half of it is 4gb, which is higher than 2gb, and hence I should be limited to 2GB. However, when trying to move the slider, it starts displaying the "2GB limit" is red even though I am under it, and hitting apply just resets it to 1GB.



File -> Sharpcap settings -> memory -> memory limits



Default:

default.png (36.74 KiB) Viewed 99 times

Moving slider to right:

slider_move.png (44.75 KiB) Viewed 99 times

Hitting apply resets it to 1024



I read in the forum that this may be limited by system when it reserves some memory and sharpcap only sees a part of it (viewtopic.php?t=7420). But looking at sharpcap logs, I can see that it can actually see the complete 8GB.



Debug 09:43:25.456951 #14 Total Physical Memory 7.89 GB
Debug 09:43:25.457010 #14 Available Physical Memory 3.45 GB


What am I missing?

I also have a screen recording of this behavior but the forum isn't allowing uploading .mp4 files.

- Robbie

[admin]

Hi Robbie,

the limit of half system memory is for the paid version, while the free version has traditionally been limited to 2Gb, 1Gb for each of the two options.

That being said, the next major update (version 4.2, which is currently not quite finished, but beta test versions are available) has a more lenient approach to memory usage in the free version:

* The Live Stacking and Display slider is removed - SharpCap will use as much memory as necessary for that providing it is available

* The 'High Speed Frame Cache' slider starts at 1.5Gb, not 1Gb

Additionally, for SharpCap Pro users, the maximum memory you can set the slider to is increased (for those with lots of memory) to

* The larger of half of system memory _or_ system memory less 6Gb

So, what you are seeing is correct - it's nothing to do with the amount of available memory, just the expected limitation of the free version.

thanks,

Robin

[robbistron]

Thank you for the response Robin. I understand it now - it is 2GB split between frame caching and live stacking! The updates in 4.2 seem pretty cool, looking forward to it.