How much RAM for gaming? Latest testing results.

[trents]

I found this interesting and it may be helpful for the would be gamers among us who are making build purchase decisions.

https://www.techspot.com/article/1770-how-much-ram-pc-gaming/

 

[EarthDog]

Nice to see what weve said supported.

 

[bigtallanddopey]

Good article and shows the trend of increasing ram needs these days.

It’s not just in gaming either, I have a new pc at work with 8GB ram (amazing I know) whilst my colleague has on older pc with just 4GB. He regularly maxes out the ram when using excel and a web browser for instance and the pc often hangs whilst loading. These days I think 8GB is a more or less the minimum for anyone.

 

[trents]

Good article and shows the trend of increasing ram needs these days.

It’s not just in gaming either, I have a new pc at work with 8GB ram (amazing I know) whilst my colleague has on older pc with just 4GB. He regularly maxes out the ram when using excel and a web browser for instance and the pc often hangs whilst loading. These days I think 8GB is a more or less the minimum for anyone.

Yes, I would agree. I would also venture to say that having an SSD installed can help mitigate lack of system RAM since page filing will be significantly faster than with a spinner.

 

[Alaric]

Good article, although a little more mainstream test rig would have been nice. Anyone building a rig like that would probably just throw 32-64 GB of RAM in it anyway. LOL

 

[Mandrake4565]

Thanks for sharing Mr T.

 

[EarthDog]

Good article, although a little more mainstream test rig would have been nice. Anyone building a rig like that would probably just throw 32-64 GB of RAM in it anyway. LOL

Likely true, but that isnt the point of the article, the system. It's the data that is pulled from it. The beginning even mentioned why it specifically chose that rig.

 

[Alaric]

probably isn’t the best way to determine how much system memory the average gamer requires. We’d also assume if you have a $1,000+ graphics card on your system, buying 16 GB of RAM or more is not an issue. Although even then, the analysis is part of the fun here.

Yeah, they mentioned it. LOL

 

[ngaugler]

I had to bump my pagefile to 6GB with only 16GB of RAM. BattleField V would occasionally OOM error otherwise. I don't see much disk activity so I think it's just Windows being Windows, but I started at 2GB, then 4GB before settling on 6GB to prevent OOM crashes.


Some apps that run in the background:

BackBlaze (Backups are configured to only run at 4AM)
BoxCryptor (Encrypted data storage - not used during gaming)
Creative Sound Blaster has some daemons I see in Task Manager
EVGA Flow Control (For EVGA CLC 280)
EVGA Precision X (For EVGA RTX 2080)
Discord
Dropbox
Razer Central (For DeathAdder Mouse)
Razer Synapse (For DeathAdder Mouse)
iCUE (For K70 keyboard)
Nvidia (For GTX 2080)
Origins (For BFV)
Slack
Steam (For other games)


Sure there's some bloat, but other than maybe Backblaze, Boxcryptor, Dropbox and Slack, the other apps are apps most gamers are going to have running all the time. I've yet to buy more RAM since it doesn't appear the swap is being actively used, but I want to avoid it and will buy some sooner or later. FWIW PUBG runs fine on 16GB of RAM with much less.. I just cannot recall how much less.

 

[EarthDog]

Odd. I can run 2gb static with 16gb.

Yeah, they mentioned it. LOL

The message seems lost...

 

[wingman99]

Good to see that my 16GB is still enough.

 

[trents]

I had to bump my pagefile to 6GB with only 16GB of RAM. BattleField V would occasionally OOM error otherwise. I don't see much disk activity so I think it's just Windows being Windows, but I started at 2GB, then 4GB before settling on 6GB to prevent OOM crashes.


Some apps that run in the background:

BackBlaze (Backups are configured to only run at 4AM)
BoxCryptor (Encrypted data storage - not used during gaming)
Creative Sound Blaster has some daemons I see in Task Manager
EVGA Flow Control (For EVGA CLC 280)
EVGA Precision X (For EVGA RTX 2080)
Discord
Dropbox
Razer Central (For DeathAdder Mouse)
Razer Synapse (For DeathAdder Mouse)
iCUE (For K70 keyboard)
Nvidia (For GTX 2080)
Origins (For BFV)
Slack
Steam (For other games)


Sure there's some bloat, but other than maybe Backblaze, Boxcryptor, Dropbox and Slack, the other apps are apps most gamers are going to have running all the time. I've yet to buy more RAM since it doesn't appear the swap is being actively used, but I want to avoid it and will buy some sooner or later. FWIW PUBG runs fine on 16GB of RAM with much less.. I just cannot recall how much less.

I'm wondering if you need to do a fresh from scratch install of Windows.

 

[Alaric]

The message seems lost...

Apparently

probably isn’t the best way to determine how much system memory the average gamer requires.

 

[caddi daddi]

I have been playing around with limited vram and system ram and gaming.
I through together a rig with a gtx970, 4 gigs of 1333 ddr3 and a sata ssd on a quality 1920x 1080p monitor and a 4690K clocked to 4.0.
I loaded gtaV with all my mods, set all the settings to max, even though I used more than the cards vram and way more than the system ram, the thing games at what I would call butter, not one stutter or hitch.
when I turn off fraps I might even think I was gaming on my 8086K rig with a 1080, just not at 2560x1440.

 

[EarthDog]

How each game responds to such a situation will vary. It's more typical to experience issues like stuttering and hitching when eclipsing vram and system ram availability.

Apparently

Confirmed!

 

[AnimeMania]

You should show this article to people who get gaming laptops.

 

[caddi daddi]

How each game responds to such a situation will vary. It's more typical to experience issues like stuttering and hitching when eclipsing vram and system ram availability.

I surly agree with you.
I have even played the game, with some graphics settings lowered, with my trusty asus hd7850 2 gig card without hitches or stutters.
so it would appear to me that sata, paired with an ssd is plenty fast enough to maintain smooth game play at an acceptable frame rate for me.
and further, fsx steam edition is playing rather well also, but, at this time I still have about half my addons and mods to add in but, still.... butter.

 

[Kenrou]

"For example, last year we found using the GTX 1060 3GB would often result in higher system memory usage compared to the 6GB model. This is because at times you’ll run out of VRAM, forcing the operating system to tap into system memory. If you run out of system memory, some game assets are moved to your local storage device, though at this point the performance hit will be so significant that the game will almost certainly become unplayable."

I been saying this since the damned thing came out and been steering people away from it, even 4gb (ex:970) chokes performance with certain games like CoD BO/Warfare series and Titanfall. Seem to remember Crysis also needed at least 3gb to work smoothly ?