[jondestoppeleire]

Problem

The memory limits in Preferences are fixed numbers. They do not protect small machines, and they hold back large ones. An 8 GB machine can set a 32 GB cache with no warning. A 128 GB machine stops at a 32 GB cache and 16 HQ buffers. GPU texture cap stops at 16384 px, under the long edge of a 400 MP frame.

Change

Each cache row now shows a recommendation from the machine's RAM. The user can go past it, and the hint then turns amber with a warning icon. GPU texture cap goes higher and has no recommendation. Default values and the default HQ cap do not change, and no row has a lower limit than before.

Recommended value, with a 61 MP frame open at the default preview size:

Row	Old limit	8 GB	32 GB	128 GB	New limit
Preview cache limit	32768 MB	4096 MB	16384 MB	65536 MB	Larger of old limit and all of RAM
Preview cache	64 photos	139	559	2236	Larger of old limit and all of RAM
HQ buffers	16 photos	2	10	40	Larger of old limit and all of RAM
Rendered frames	64 frames	104	419	1677	Larger of old limit and all of RAM
GPU texture cap	16384 px	—	—	—	65536 px

Why this shape

A recommendation is half of RAM, or how many entries of that row's size fit in that half, so it needs no GPU types or machine tiers. A user who goes past a recommendation can run out of memory, and the amber hint is the only protection.

Testing

• The real app ran on one 128 GB Apple Silicon machine with a 61 MP ARW. At the default it loads at 6144 px, and with GPU texture cap at 16384 it loads whole. Nothing has run on a low-memory machine or a discrete GPU.
• Unit tests pass RAM in, so they do not depend on the test machine.
• The new strings in de, ja, ko, vi and zh_CN are mine, and no native speaker has checked them.

CI failures not from this PR

• Test and Lint: tests/test_i18n.py::test_catalog_covers_every_marked_message_and_preserves_formats[vi] also fails on main at e22f98e4. vi.json lacks 39 strings from the roll work on main, and none of them come from this PR. It is the only failure in this job, and this job goes green when main has those strings and this PR is rebased.
• Native (macos-15): GitHub cancelled this job after 15 minutes, with no steps and no log. It passes on main, so it needs a re-run. A re-run needs admin rights on this repository.

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