@blazin8s said:

How many cores do most of the Rendering Plugins cap out at?

Not sure if they impose any limit. I'd be surprised if they did.

@blazin8s said:

Also, does Video Card affect rendering speed at all?

Depends on the render engine - some support rendering with GPU - some doesn't.

"Program stops"? It crashes?

And at only 1GB? Then it's not a 32bit limitation. As you said, it's way before the 32bit limit. Which normally is at around 2GB. With SU8M1 under a 64bit OS this is now 4GB - because they enable the large address aware flag.

Now, what is the size of the model you have? Faces, edges, groups components etc? The only time I ever ran into such memory usage has been when rendering with V-Ray. Without I have never ever ran into memory limitation with SketchUp. And then I've used models with 2million faces and lots of textures...