Peter,
I think you are running out of graphics memory.
When I render a bowl of 19,000 (or whatever) segments, I have to render each one of them in 3D space, painted on six surfaces in the correct order so that the proper species image shows with the correct orientation.. The graphics card has to render all of these surfaces whether they are visible or not and everything is kept in volatile memory. All of this has to be done in as little time as possible.
To accomplish this, I had to come up with an indexing scheme that greatly speeds up the process and to my great surprise, it works surprisingly well. I designed it to handle 10,000 segments, though, and that indexing code took me a couple months to finish. When I finished, I was my current 5' 4-1/2" height where I used to be a 6' 4" hunk. I'm shocked as hell that it works for nearly 20,000 segments.
The code is so complicated, though, that I won't touch it anymore because I can no longer figure out how the code works. So I feel your pain, but I'm not convinced it is the software that is causing the problem because 32 GB should make that a non-issue. The pain I feel doesn't hurt enough to make me want to jump into the fire pit again since there are a lot of golf courses in the country calling my name.
If you really want to make a bowl with more than 20,000 segments, you should consider using Woodturner PRO. With 32GB of memory, you can triple that number easily. It's just going to take you a long time to paint it and computer or video memory will not be an issue.
:->
Lloyd