Hello all,
My answer refers only to MaxwellRender (nothing about Studio).
The program, MaxwellRender, has to be written specifically to take advantage of Snow Leopard to access more than 4Gigs of RAM during rendering. The 64-bit tech preview Maxwell Program included in the regular install does this, however, it has a bug in my experience where it demands more memory as time goes by, even if you are not rendering anything (i.e. if you just open the program and do nothing, it will use up all your RAM at some point if you leave it open and idle.)
Now, if you use the regular MaxwellRender program, you will not be able to use more RAM than in Leopard, because the program was written to
not take advantage of it.
This topic pops up every once in a while here, so in short, we all need a new version that takes advantage of more RAM. Note that MaxwellRender versions are already available that can take advantage of more than 4GBs of RAM in Linux and Windows.
The reason that it has taken so long to have MaxwellRender available in 64-bits in Snow Leopard (compared to other operating systems) is that Mac OS X doesn't have the same libraries and tools available that are available to Linux and Windows. I believe this was just alleviated last year (or so) with new tools called QT. Now, I don't think Next Limit will care to share any thoughts on why, how, when this is going to happen, as you know, they are commercial secrets most likely...
Working great for me. Rendering on my Mac Pro 3.0 Octo seems a little snappier, maybe just from access to full 8GB of ram. So far no problems.