Quote:however if i start adding all the same forces and colliders, surely ill start to run into the same overheads that limited the particle count in the first case ( ram and calculation speed)
Forces and colliders are generally very cheap. I mean, the Particle Force operator itself is slower than both of them, because it has to calculate nearest-neighbor detection for the low res sim, which is a relatively expensive operation, compared to just adding a force to a particle or doing a collision check against a precomputed kdtree
The real slowdown comes from PhysX and Particle Physics operators, which is what you'd want to use the upressing workflow for.
Partitioning is already available in the PRT Exporter (Export Particles operator). Maybe in the future I will add it to the tyCache format.