I know this is an old thread so forgive me.

We have a game where every character is vertex animated.

There are a ton of frames for each one, and some of the MDL files are up around 40MB each, with the largest being 108MB. When I load one of the 40MB models into the game it actually ends up consuming several hundred MB of memory. I assume it's because it's decompressing the vertex positions all at once into memory or something similar.

According to this thread, vertex animated characters don't use up memory, but in my experience they certainly do. I've had to put a 2GB minimum RAM requirement on our game because of this. When I have 4 animated characters on screen at once and each of the MDL files is 40MB, the RAM being used (according to the task manager listing for acknex.exe) is over 1GB. Shouldn't it only be 160MB for the models and then about 100MB more for the levels, etc?

Am I doing something wrong?