8 vs 16 GB of memory

[TechWizard]

Game developers use math to calculate memory specifications, I had programming in college and code is all based on math. When a Black Desert developer says you need 6GB for best play and 4GB is minim required, they have done the math. Game developers sell millions of games they have to have game Specifications so the games don't fail.

Math doesn't account for human error.

And I have to add - these games fail ALL the time.

 

[wingman99]

Math doesn't account for human error.

And I have to add - these games fail ALL the time.

Yes every game they sell will fail with all the millions of users.

 

[Woomack]

Game developers use math to calculate memory specifications, I had programming in college and code is all based on math. When a Black Desert developer says you need 6GB for best play and 4GB is minim required, they have done the math. Game developers sell millions of games, they have game Specifications so the games don't fail.

It runs fine as long as you stick to one location. If you pass the map and play longer then much more data is loading and it just sits in the RAM till you restart the game or change character ( which is like restarting the game ). Basic specification was made after game release. Now game is about 3x larger. It's just weird it's not using any virtual memory/swap file. I can only add that on this PC I'm not using anything else, so only games. Anyway I got new memory for this pc yesterday.

I can't really agree that games don't fail. Then there wouldn't be so many patches and literally for online games there are couple of patches per week. Many single player games had really big issues with stability or other things like managing memory or displaying textures. In theory programming should give a result based on maths but these numbers are based on some data. At the end human is providing starting data and there can be always a mistake or calculation based on early version of the program.

 

[Kenrou]

Game developers use math to calculate memory specifications, I had programming in college and code is all based on math. When a Black Desert developer says you need 6GB for best play and 4GB is minim required, they have done the math. Game developers sell millions of games, they have game Specifications so the games don't fail.

Please account for addons, expansions, graphical updates etc etc etc, plus everything running in the background with Windows. Nowadays 8gb should be considered bare minimum (ex: seen World of Warcraft hit 9gb on its own)

- - - Updated - - -

It runs fine as long as you stick to one location. If you pass the map and play longer then much more data is loading and it just sits in the RAM till you restart the game or change character ( which is like restarting the game ). Basic specification was made after game release. Now game is about 3x larger. It's just weird it's not using any virtual memory/swap file. I can only add that on this PC I'm not using anything else, so only games. Anyway I got new memory for this pc yesterday.

+1

 

[JrClocker]

There is nothing wrong with my computer.

As I said above...if you have more memory, Windows will load more into memory on boot, and unload less from memory until it has to (i.e. a programs requesting memory.)

Windows and most games will run perfectly fine on 8 GB of memory. However, loading will take longer as Windows will have to use the disk memory swap file to free up RAM.

I initially ran my system with 16 GB. When I saw my memory usage bumping up into 8 and 10 GB of memory, I decided to increase to 32 GB. Now, Windows will bump up into 14 to 16 GB when I am using the system heavily. (I don't just run 1 program at a time).

When I see my memory usage consistently bumping up into 26 to 28 GB, I'll increase to 64 GB.

And, a steam survey of what most users have for PC memory is kind of a useless statistic. Most people I know (i.e. not on this forum) do not have current generation PCs, or game on older laptops. Older PCs and Laptops max out at 8 to 12 GB of RAM...so they are probably maxed for RAM and can't/won't do a system upgrade.

 

[EarthDog]

Windows and most games will run perfectly fine on 8 GB of memory. However, loading will take longer as Windows will have to use the disk memory swap file to free up RAM.

This is superfetch and prefetch in action, yep.

And, a steam survey of what most users have for PC memory is kind of a useless statistic. Most people I know (i.e. not on this forum) do not have current generation PCs, or game on older laptops. Older PCs and Laptops max out at 8 to 12 GB of RAM...so they are probably maxed for RAM and can't/won't do a system upgrade.

But it is what it is.. a snapshot of Steam users and their systems... its a solid statistic, actually. It encompasses enthusiasts and run of the mill systems, be it new or old. Steam users, period... it does not discriminate. What does upgrading or being at the the limit of their system have to do with anything? (will go get coffee..i feel like I am missing your point)

Side note: Wingman wasn't talking to you about 'something wrong' with your PC.. .it was the post above, WOomack, who he was talking to.

 

[TechWizard]

It runs fine as long as you stick to one location. If you pass the map and play longer then much more data is loading and it just sits in the RAM till you restart the game or change character ( which is like restarting the game ). Basic specification was made after game release. Now game is about 3x larger. It's just weird it's not using any virtual memory/swap file. I can only add that on this PC I'm not using anything else, so only games. Anyway I got new memory for this pc yesterday.

I can't really agree that games don't fail. Then there wouldn't be so many patches and literally for online games there are couple of patches per week. Many single player games had really big issues with stability or other things like managing memory or displaying textures. In theory programming should give a result based on maths but these numbers are based on some data. At the end human is providing starting data and there can be always a mistake or calculation based on early version of the program.

Please account for addons, expansions, graphical updates etc etc etc, plus everything running in the background with Windows. Nowadays 8gb should be considered bare minimum (ex: seen World of Warcraft hit 9gb on its own)

Thank you guys for justifying the points I have been trying to get across. It seems there is a major disconnect here. I'm not trying to say that you can't run games on 8GB. I'm just saying you won't have a good time in the near future doing so unless you are willing to sacrifice more and more performance.

Every game has its set of issues. Millions are actually effected. This constantly happened with WoW when they would release expansions - hence them always releasing large content patches prior to releasing an expansion. They almost always had severe failures and the servers would be offline for HOURS past their estimates. Patches fail and there are wide spread bugs that effect most users on all kinds of games. Just because you can do some math to get an estimate on what kind of memory usage your program will consume doesn't mean that will be the case when all is said and done. The code that people would then create would have to be perfect to achieve that level of accuracy. It just won't happen and they are not recalculating the memory requirements that often, not to mention user content almost never is taken into account.

 

[Kenrou]

I'm just saying you won't have a good time in the near future doing so unless you are willing to sacrifice more and more performance.

IMHO this is the reason we always try to get the best setup possible, all games ever made were designed to run on max settings, not medium or low as you're not having the full experience of something you bought. In this particular case, 8gb, you might have to tone down settings like view distance or texture quality to play the game properly. Not fun

 

[wingman99]

Well I usually only buy minimal amount for my rig to save a lot of money, no waste I use my parts to the MAX and by the time I need more it's time for a upgrade anyway, I've been doing this for 30 years. I have lots of experience with running 4GB and 8GB for new gaming. With BF at 4GB running max settings when playing on certain map the PC ran fine until the hole map was loaded then it was doing file swapping to the HDD, that is a game bug for not releasing memory fast enough.

 

[deathman20]

If its a new rig I'd suggest going larger 16GB at least for a minimum. If its a older PC 8GB still holds true but starting to creep on the edge of I should really get more.
I've had 8GB since the day I built the rig in my sig. Its held true, worked nice and yes I do come close (7.4GB) to maxing it out, but it closes and pushed other programs out of memory to make room. Considering the OS chews up 3-4GB because it has things loaded into it, it does have the ability to make room if needed.

Gaming = 16GB I'd say but yes you could squeeze by with 8GB currently. Future that might change with some games.
Internet/Basic Office Applications/E-mail = 8GB is more than fine for the system, anything more is really overkill IMO.

 

[wingman99]

Here is a video showing 8GB is all you need now and into the future for gaming.

 

[Lochekey]

Here is a video showing 8GB is all you need now and into the future for gaming.

I would be interested in seeing his system ram usage while running these tests. I have a feeling that it was run on a pretty lean system with the game being the only thing running.

Under this usage scenario I agree that 8gb is enough. For most people nowadays though we tend to run multiple things simultaneously and the background tasks tend to be as much to blame as the game for eating ram.

For me I intend to continue to recommend 16gb for new builds based on the assumption that most users are not going to keep a clean system and will benefit from having the wiggle room 16gb offers.

The other thing is 16gb of ram is getting cheap enough that it is not a deal breaker anymore.

 

[Woomack]

That video is showing only difference in performance. There are games which will simply freeze or show lack of memory error when is not enough RAM and later will crash. When you play something like Civilization V and reach max RAM then game is starting to work much slower and I mean like it's sometimes freezing for short period of time. So it's not that average FPS is low but that short freezes in some games make it no fun or are not playable at all ( try pvp in any online game with lags ).
I'm not saying that 8GB isn't enough as maybe 90%+ games will still run great but there are some games that will need more, especially when you are using other applications in the background. Many gamers are using additional communication soft, web browsers, music players and other stuff which is using RAM. Many are also using a lot of useless soft as they don't realize it's using PC resources and make everything slower.
So at least for me 8GB is minimum for a gaming PC and recommended is 16GB considering low RAM prices and that many new games from popular series are using more RAM each year.

 

[Jeff G]

To take this in a slightly different direction - How about a build that is focused on nothing more than basic web browsing and video editing with GoPro Suite? Will 8gb be enough for the GoPro Suite to run smoothly, or does the 16gb make more sense for video editing? I'm piecing together a budget build, 16gb vs 8gb adds about $30. Would the $30 be best spent elsewhere, or is the ram upgrade the best idea?

 

[TechWizard]

To take this in a slightly different direction - How about a build that is focused on nothing more than basic web browsing and video editing with GoPro Suite? Will 8gb be enough for the GoPro Suite to run smoothly, or does the 16gb make more sense for video editing? I'm piecing together a budget build, 16gb vs 8gb adds about $30. Would the $30 be best spent elsewhere, or is the ram upgrade the best idea?

I think $30 is nominal. I can't really see where else you could spend that which would increase your performance in a notable fashion. Having a higher amount of memory will allow you to buffer larger amounts of data in the GoPro Suite. Sure, you could have 8GB and set yourself a reasonable pagefile if you have an SSD in that machine, but then you're adding unnecessary read/writes to the SSD.

This conversation is boiling down to what kind of user you are and what you expect from your machine. There are those of us who play games with larger resource requirements while multi-tasking with chat programs, web browsing, movies, remote connections, and whatever else we happen to be doing.

Then there are those who just boot up a game and that's all they run. Maybe some light web browsing in the background. For that 8GB is more than sufficient until you get into games that require excessive resources as the game progresses.

Honestly though, the rule of no-brainer upgrades will always hold true. There just simply isn't a reason to save $30-50 when you're building a high/mid end system meant to handle situations as the ones we have described.

 

[Jeff G]

There just simply isn't a reason to save $30-50 when you're building a high/mid end system meant to handle situations as the ones we have described.

I agree here, and I built my gaming PC with 16gb because the cost of the ram was still cheaper than any other part in my system. Why not play it safe and go 16gb when I've gone all out on everything else?
I also went with 8gb on my HTPC because I'll never use more than that on something that simply is meant for streaming Netflix or watching a bluray.
Like you said, it really gets to a point where it's a situational item. Not everyone needs 16gb, but not everyone can get away with only 8gb.