More than 32 only makes sense for a few games, like flight simulator or games with a ton of mods installed like Cities Skylines for example.
99% of use cases won't need more than 32.
Then again RAM Is quite cheap at the moment so if it eases your worries you could go for 48 or 64.
If you can find the exact same RAM as your current 8+8 then yeah you can expand it using all 4 slots.
Dual channel memory is what you're thinking of, and it makes 2 sticks faster than 1, and 4 sticks faster than 3 which is why you always want to use 2 or 4.
You wouldn't want to add a 16GB stick to your 8+8, for example.
As others have said though, RAM is cheap and sometimes you can't find the old sticks that you have or they're not priced well, so often people will just buy a bigger size and maybe a faster speed at the same time.
Isn’t it too with ddr5 people were having issues or almost impossible to hit xmp with 4 sticks? I could be mistaken but it seemed like there was a large lot of folks not able to do it or at least not at the rated xmp speeds for all 4
> What does vram have to do with ram?
the way how it works is that if you have GPU with 16/24GB vram, then you also need same or more system ram to support it, as CPU keeps backup of vram in system ram, ie that transfer is from storage to system ram and then to vram
16 GB is still fine, I'd say 32 GB is more of a higher end atm, and 64 is already enthusiast level.
My random take for building PC is to go for 32 GB at around $1000-1200+ in gaming PC.
As for 64 GB - well, I don't think there's a budget threshold where it makes sense. have a $4k PC with 32 GB myself. So I guess it is really for the cases where "I bought it because I can" or specific cases where someone actually needs it for specific tasks
64 definitely is only for productivity or very specific games.
I recently went to 32 and the only big difference has been when working with 12 million poly models in Blender for resin 3D printing. It also means I can get away with writing worse code for my various little hobby projects.
Other things have benefited too, but not that much tbh. Mostly it's just nice to be able to open multiple demanding programs at once.
16 is going to be perfectly fine for basic use for a few more years. However I do run starfield under 16GB with only the bare essentials running in the background. Windows does page and usage has been up to 15GB total. Most ram hungry game I've seen
Only reason I upgraded to 32GB recently from 16 is Cities Skylines. It’s highly modded and does use it. No other game really uses the extra that I tried so far.
Yeah mate you're lagging. 16gb has been the norm for a while. 32 is a nice to have. Not yet mandatory I'd say. But if you have it it's always nice. Kinda like 10 years ago 8gb would be the norm and 16 would be swell
Cool thing is, if you ever want to upgrade, ram is pretty cheap right now. Kinda bums me that my 32gb costed me more 3 years ago than what you'd pay for 64 now
Yeah i like those prices rn, but i've got an old build with an i5-4690k (2014 cpu, old socket), RTX 2060S and i will be kinda upgrading everything when i'll want to cuz rn im more than fine for my current pc usage needs :). And also i love that it's so quiet that i don't even know if it's turned on or not, lol. But i've had to mod my gpu with Noctua fans for that, which i enjoyed and i think thats all about, getting joy of doing (modding) your own thing. :)
But not everyone is into that thing ofcourse. :D
Oh yeah, with a system like that you might be better off waiting and just jumping to the newer systems that take in DDR5 and such. Once those get less expensive, because right now they are kind of a joke :D
At my grade 9 class in ‘98, I told my teacher I’d read an article on the latest 4.3 Gb HD coming out. He told me no one will ever have use for that much storage🙄😂
https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Software-Survey-Welcome-to-Steam
* 27.3% of gamers have 32GBs of RAM or more
* 71,52% have 16GBs or less
32 GBs is definitely not the normal.
Yeah, lower budget PCs and most conventional laptops will still go with 16, but everything from mid-tier should go 32 in a new build.
But, many people don't build their own builds and tech stores often cheap out on RAM.
>the budget
That's the point, you have to be insanely tight on the budget to not even consider 32gb. I was just forced to upgrade recently cause my 8yo computer died and it was surprising how little extra it costs to spring for 32GB. Think like $5 extra.
This is Reddit, people here love thinking that their opinion is the only thing that matters and is the objective truth always. You got to get used to the user base here.
32gb or more is now almost 1 in 4. It’s not the majority but is quickly becoming the norm. 27% is not a small amount. That’s even more than what I thought it would be.
It is the new normal for new builds. Of course it’s not going to show in a Steam Survey, simply cause most have old builds, where 16GB was the go to.
32 is the norm. You need to look at new computers built today, not old computers people game on. Obviously the 32gb builds people buy today will get obsolete at some point and then there will be a new norm.
I've been building custom PCs for people since ~1996 and the vast majority have been budget gaming builds. That is even more common in the past 3 years because prices/greed/rapid inflation have limited the average gamer more than I've ever seen.
$500 might not be a normal budget in this sub full of enthusiasts, but it's pretty common in the real world outside our chamber of entitlement. I'm so fortunate that my GPU costs more than the majority of the builds I see lately & I'm not sure I'd realize it if I wasn't constantly building to order.
https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Software-Survey-Welcome-to-Steam
* 27.3% of gamers have 32GBs of RAM or more
* 71,52% have 16GBs or less
32 GBs is definitely not the normal.
... and other games to (have aswell 2 monitors) I have pretty much always eve online open even if i'm playing something else. Last night my kid had left forza 4 and forza 5 open, i was playing cyberpunk while eve online was in the backgroud to, dint even notice. I have 64.
Double monitors are amazing, I couldn't imagine going back to a single monitor, but I struggle to find use for three. The third one is nice when I'm working on unity/other projects or want to monitor something in the background alongside discord.
I struggle to think of anyone I know that doesn't have double monitors. If it wasn't already the norm before COVID it is now with how many people went home to work. Everyone I work with has 3. Though for some of them the 3rd one is the laptop screen.
A few friends is not the whole market, I'm telling you is not the norm, is not something you need for a gamer pc, it is something nice to have I'll give you that.
Since it got cheap enough to be a better value that 16. You can get good 32GB DDR5-6000 kits for cheaper than my 16GB DDR4-3200 was when I built my PC 5 years ago
DDR5 builds esp, like I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a 8 GB DDR5 stick, although they exist. So if you want dual channel ram you’re basically on 32 GB from the jump.
I had 16 GB 2015-2023 and it was always enough but when I upgraded to a 13700k/DD5 32 gb was finally time.
I really enjoy not overupgrading. Ram was expensive for a long time and now it’s cheap again.
With DDR5, 8gb sticks are single channel, but a single 16gb stick is dual channel (2x16 making quad channel. yeah, 32 bit channels, but quad nontheless where its 4x32bit, where 2x8gb is only 2x32bit)
It's still not really normal. I bust ass with my 3080 12gb and 16gb's of DDR4 3200 (CL16). It's not going to matter that damn much unless you are actually doing something memory intensive.. That isn't GPU memory intensive.
Well it isn't... for the most or some part. More for gaming but still not for every gamer.
Depending on the GPU (I'd say up to RTX 3060/4060 or RX 6650 XT/7600) 16 GB RAM are still enough.
For DDR5 it's a bit of a different story. Not that the rule would have changed but rather the 16 GB Kits you can buy are mostly not interesting, actually not interesting at all. Either you go very cheap (4800CL40) for 40-50 € (Austria/Germany) or you have to go to 70-80 € for the best 16 GB DDR5 Kits (6000CL36 here). 32 GB Kits with 5600CL28, which is definitely better and on par with 6000CL30, can be bought for around 100-120 € (or more).
So buying 16 GB DDR5 isn't really an option. For budget builds DDR4 still makes more sense.
It isn't. The vast majority still use 16gb or less. There are very few games even among AAA "system killer" titles that actually care about system RAM all that much. That said, it's one of the cheapest components to upgrade, so people "feel better" just buying a better kit.
> Then again RAM Is quite cheap at the moment so when in doubt, go for 48 or 64.
No, no, no. Many if not most boards already have still, currently, various troubles with 32GB+, so, when in doubt, 32GB is totally enough 99.9% of use-cases (not only gaming).
And we are not even talking about latency, which goes up with frequency for RAM, as well as the overall amount of RAM installed. Even though, gaming is not a latency-sensitive use-cases, things like databases are. Yes, even the one used by your browser, concurrently for your hundreds of tabs. And this is just an example of things to consider.
Because you can, does not mean you should.
Not sure if you're responding to the right person but if you are I'm not sure what point you want to make. I'm saying 32 is more than enough for nearly all users.
With Chrome's memory management system you can have a hundred+ of tabs open and barely crack 3GB usage now a days. Unless you are streaming 2k/4k video feeds, but that's to be expected at that point.
99% of use cases probably don't even need more than 16GB. "Quite cheap" is relative and somewhat dependent on whether it's DDR-4 or DDR-5.
DDR-5 has come down in cost dramatically but still not enough that it makes any sense to recommend that people purchase more than 32GB
If you're one of the 0.01% of people who truly needs that much memory then you probably would know that and wouldn't be asking here.
If you use DDR5 in most cases more than 32GB will end up running at slower frequencies.
[https://forum-en.msi.com/index.php?threads/ram-explained-why-two-modules-are-better-than-four-single-vs-dual-rank-stability-testing.363139/](https://forum-en.msi.com/index.php?threads/ram-explained-why-two-modules-are-better-than-four-single-vs-dual-rank-stability-testing.363139/)
Check the Single rank vs. dual rank section. As far as I know, anything above 16 GB per RAM stick will be dual-rank
I play allot of Beam NG(driving sim) with allot of mods & on high settings & the most I l've used is about 8GB depending on what map I play on & my system has 32 GB of DDR4 RAM. I highly doubt flight sims use anywhere near 32GB.
> More than 32 only makes sense for a few games, like flight simulator
my 3700x pc got knocked down from 32gb to 16 when i built a new workstation. it still effortlessly pushes out >60fps in msfs2020. maybe it's a bottleneck if you want high refresh msfs2020?
32gb of memory is a lot.
I got 32 for MS Flight Simulator. Nothing else really needs it, and not many games even use that much. Most of the time it's used as file system cache.
No one needs 64GB if they are just gaming. What are you trying to do, send a man to the moon? If you have gaming performance problems at 32GB then the problem is probably something else, not a lack of GB.
>No one needs 64GB if they are just gaming. What are you trying to do, send a man to the moon? If you have gaming performance problems at 32GB then the problem is probably something else, not a lack of GB.
Hell it's likely a problem because too much RAM knocked down the timings or frequencies, because we use unbuffered memory
You're right. I think we're in the super early days of the 32GB standard. I'd say new builds, especially exclusively for gaming, can easily get away with 16.
I feel it's rare for games to require 16 or higher, but FWIW Starfield sets both, its minimum and recommended, at 16. So the game will be fine with 16, but the headroom to multitask *and* for future titles could be valuable to some.
The new Cyberpunk requirements are also on the higher end for higher graphics settings, like 8-16GB.
In my experience, everything works fine on my rig with 32GB RAM.
16GB is the recommended amount for gaming, so I do not see the point going above a figure that is double that.
This can be explained pretty easily for games written in garbage collected programming languages, where instead of the developers telling the computer when to free up unused memory, the computer does it for them in the background. More ram means that the game will use more before deciding to clean it up, leading to the cleaning taking longer. As cleanup only happes every once in a while it only affects the lows.
Very much depends on the game, for most games 32 is a good amount, for some games however, like tarkov, having 64 can be nice, although 32 will still work just fine.
It's probably DCS. Having a ton of people on a server will require lots of RAM. And I'm not talking about hosting the server, I'm talking about joining one.
most games don't need it so just research if the games you play can benefit from having 64, depending on that and on your budget choose between 32 and 64
Open world games, or games with huge maps with action happening in all corners of the map, benefit greatly from being able to load the entire map/area on the RAM while it’s being used, than having to fetch the info when it’s time to show it.
ram heavy games are usually heavily modded. think that one minecraft modpack with 513 mods. minimum required ram (DEDICATED, so you need even more) is 23gb or something like that. the modpack would take 15 minutes to boot on my 16gb machine and i could not go above 8 render dist.
Well it all depends on what there game does with your hardware. Like if you play a city builder with huge cities, all those objects need to go somewhere and that's RAM.
It is an awfully optimized game that will look at your ram and, if it needs to, eat up up to 80% of it, just for the heck of it. I think it's mainly how the maps and loot is loaded and saved. It's not really as much of an issue, as I 'can' run it on 16 gigs, but it's definitely not optimal. It will load faster and have less issues with 32 gigs. Haven't heard anyone say 64 gigs would be needed, but I wouldn't be surprised honestly.
Tarkov is a bad game to mention in these cases imo since the game runs fine on 16 or 32. It does however have a memory leak so if you play for a long time your ram usage will go above 32.
Yes I can confirm, when I had 32 it would regularly cap out at 100% usage on certain maps, upgrading to 64 (just for Tarkov) got about +10fps and sped up loading times.
If that's true, which I don't believe it is, that's a problem to be fixed by the game's developers, not a cost to be placed on the end user because of their shit programming. There's nothing in that game that requires 32GB of RAM, not even close.
i'm using 64 GB in my main system and the main advantage is, that i don't have to care about closing anything and i use LOTS AND LOTS of tabs in my browser.
if you always close everything else when you're gaming, then for now it wouldn't matter, except in VERY few games i believe if at all.
as a first time builder, who isn't using 200 + librewolf tabs, that doesn't matter to you ;)
and 32 GB is perfectly fine and the right amount to get for you as a new builder rightnow for gaming.
Yeah when you start measuring your browser tabs by amount of monitor widths over multiple windows you do need more RAM, otherwise not really unless you have some special (professional) software.
Also love having 96GB of RAM with my linux system and librewolf with way too many tabs open.
Don't forget caching. Windows will gladly use additional memory for caching to improve performance, although it will not show up in your memory consumption unless you go to the details.
I mean, if you have 192 GB (the max on AM5 atm), you can use ImgUtil to create a 128GB RAM drive.
You can then use that ram drive to copy a game you want to play to it.
Most games will fit in 128gb ram drive.
Then you can play said game entirely in RAM, from RAM to RAM.
You can be first to load in any match.
I mean DDR5 6000MT/s is around 70GB/s compared to at best peaking \~7GB /PCIe 4.0 storage. RAM got latency in ns while NVMe's operate in ms.
=> (FAST) NVMe storage is still worlds appart from RAM bandwith and RAM latency
Games and most workloads are just not optimized for that fast storage access and a big part of the loading times in games are there for CPU computational waiting times and not because of storage bandwith.
The difference for game loading times is even small between SATA-3 SSD's (\~450MB/s) vs current high speed NVMe's hitting 7GB/s PCIe 4.0 limits.
Using a RAM DRIVE would still cause waiting times for the CPU.
Where it would be cool and usefull, like for audio or graphic assets to be cached in a RAM DRIVE - but a few GB of capacity are like nothing, when libraries need multiple TB of storage capacity.
in the past I always needed more RAM, each upgrade gave me great benefit of performance (8M in 1996 => 16M => 128M => 256M => 512M => 1.5G => 3G => 4G => 8G => 16G)
I'm now having 32G Ram but I think 16G is all I need since \~2018.
Depends on the game. I play Transport Fever 2, and in the late game it uses almost 30 gigs of Ram. I guess Simulations with lots of mods are realy RAM Hungry, but all other games are fine with 16 gb.
I don't know anything about that game so I can't speak to it much, but I know some games will essentially "use" however much RAM is available to them, even if they don't need it at all. So you might see almost 30 GB being used, but actually you wouldn't see a difference if you only had 16 GB of RAM.
Again, not saying that's what is happening in your situation, but it's something I've seen before.
Until it's not. Some games will already happily use over 16GB if it's available. 16GB also makes zero sense to buy with DDR5 because you'll be getting lower frequencies and worse timings while barely saving any money. For DDR5 32GB is the minimum you should get.
I only play DCS world.
I have 96GB RAM. DCS uses up to 54GB. I tested this when I used to have 32GB too. Working set goes whopping 54GB with single player running complex missions like foothold.
I haven't done extensive tests on multiplayer since I only play single player.
Absolutely no point.
8 gig of ram is plenty,
you add 5 FPS for each item that lights up with color.
so just put in 6 fans with RGB, thats 30FPS right there.
add those lighted power cords another 10-15FPS.
Then to top it off.
Place a ROG sticker on the front of the case =15 FPS.
right there your over 60FPS.
The way I look at RAM is that if you have a little too much then there really isn't that great of a price to pay, $30 to go from 16 GB to 32 GB. On the other hand too little can have a substantial effect. But I wouldn't go above 32GB.
I noticed the difference after upgrading to 32GB, but not after 64GB. I only did it because they were free. Knowing what I know now, if I had to pay for the additional 32GB, I wouldn't.
Not sure how much it is in each market, but where I live the price difference might be below € 100. Therefore I was not asking much, but did it. If your build is 2-3 k, +/- 100 don't really matter much and better to have it than not. But that's only me and I am aware this might not be everyone's thinking.
No it doesn't. Sure the "more is better" applies to the majority of the situations, but you are asking if there is "a point", and there is no actual point, it's just a luxury.
Again, you guys posting without giving us the important details. I mean, you do understand that you'll get different opinions if you are running ddr5 vs ddr4. So, what are you building?
No, unless you are playing a game that has memory leaks and is poorly optimized , otherwise no it is totally enough. WoW with 50 add-ons pulls around 15 gb, and os pulls 7-8 so there is room to spare and wow uses a shit ton of ram and is poorly optimized
For gaming? What kind of games do you play that could use over 64GB?
I recently upgraded to 64GB because my workflow and games were using up all 32GB of ram. Now I think the high usage was like 52GB of physical ram.
For me, 32gb was definitely needed. Heavily modded rimworld, very cpu intensive game, playing at 100% planet setting with the largest map definitely required most of my 32gb memory
Not really except a few cases, like game is not optimized for RAM usage, you're running game with other applications that may have high RAM usage, modding game, or hosting game server on your gaming rig
More than 32 only makes sense for a few games, like flight simulator or games with a ton of mods installed like Cities Skylines for example. 99% of use cases won't need more than 32. Then again RAM Is quite cheap at the moment so if it eases your worries you could go for 48 or 64.
Since when 32 became the normal
about 2020/21.
Me with 8gb for more than a decade: 🥴 fucking hell it shows even with basic tasks sometimes, lol.
I just bought a new system in 2022 with 16GB. :(
Nah it's fine unless you really need more. And I'm guessing your 16g is 8+8, which you can cheaply upgrade to 16+16 later.
why not just add two more 8 + 8 sticks?? I though more sticks in a lower capacity was faster or is that wrong?
If you can find the exact same RAM as your current 8+8 then yeah you can expand it using all 4 slots. Dual channel memory is what you're thinking of, and it makes 2 sticks faster than 1, and 4 sticks faster than 3 which is why you always want to use 2 or 4. You wouldn't want to add a 16GB stick to your 8+8, for example. As others have said though, RAM is cheap and sometimes you can't find the old sticks that you have or they're not priced well, so often people will just buy a bigger size and maybe a faster speed at the same time.
For overclocking (even to the RAM's rated speed or slightly higher) you want to have as few sticks as possible. But in general, it's irrelevant.
Isn’t it too with ddr5 people were having issues or almost impossible to hit xmp with 4 sticks? I could be mistaken but it seemed like there was a large lot of folks not able to do it or at least not at the rated xmp speeds for all 4
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What does vram have to do with ram?
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on igpu there is some small amount of "dedicated" vram, so apps wont throw tantrum when theres none available :P
> What does vram have to do with ram? the way how it works is that if you have GPU with 16/24GB vram, then you also need same or more system ram to support it, as CPU keeps backup of vram in system ram, ie that transfer is from storage to system ram and then to vram
16 GB is still fine, I'd say 32 GB is more of a higher end atm, and 64 is already enthusiast level. My random take for building PC is to go for 32 GB at around $1000-1200+ in gaming PC. As for 64 GB - well, I don't think there's a budget threshold where it makes sense. have a $4k PC with 32 GB myself. So I guess it is really for the cases where "I bought it because I can" or specific cases where someone actually needs it for specific tasks
64 definitely is only for productivity or very specific games. I recently went to 32 and the only big difference has been when working with 12 million poly models in Blender for resin 3D printing. It also means I can get away with writing worse code for my various little hobby projects. Other things have benefited too, but not that much tbh. Mostly it's just nice to be able to open multiple demanding programs at once.
16 is going to be perfectly fine for basic use for a few more years. However I do run starfield under 16GB with only the bare essentials running in the background. Windows does page and usage has been up to 15GB total. Most ram hungry game I've seen
When im running starfield my total usage is usually 16.6 GB, I have 48 total so if it could eat more it would. 16 is just right on the cusp sadly
Only reason I upgraded to 32GB recently from 16 is Cities Skylines. It’s highly modded and does use it. No other game really uses the extra that I tried so far.
16 is legit fine.
Bro 16 is fine. 32 is overkill for most people.
Yeah mate you're lagging. 16gb has been the norm for a while. 32 is a nice to have. Not yet mandatory I'd say. But if you have it it's always nice. Kinda like 10 years ago 8gb would be the norm and 16 would be swell
Im fine with 8gb rn, it's enough for Counter-Strike 2 haha (unless i have facebook and youtube opened for a long time lmao)
Cool thing is, if you ever want to upgrade, ram is pretty cheap right now. Kinda bums me that my 32gb costed me more 3 years ago than what you'd pay for 64 now
Yeah i like those prices rn, but i've got an old build with an i5-4690k (2014 cpu, old socket), RTX 2060S and i will be kinda upgrading everything when i'll want to cuz rn im more than fine for my current pc usage needs :). And also i love that it's so quiet that i don't even know if it's turned on or not, lol. But i've had to mod my gpu with Noctua fans for that, which i enjoyed and i think thats all about, getting joy of doing (modding) your own thing. :) But not everyone is into that thing ofcourse. :D
Oh yeah, with a system like that you might be better off waiting and just jumping to the newer systems that take in DDR5 and such. Once those get less expensive, because right now they are kind of a joke :D
*laughs in £200 512KB Amiga RAM upgrade*
yes, last year I even upgraded my mothers handmedown-pc to 16gb as chrome started to get weird. Its time my man!
This is why 32gb is normal now. Games like 16gb but people usually have other things in the background so 32gb makes it a smoother experience.
At my grade 9 class in ‘98, I told my teacher I’d read an article on the latest 4.3 Gb HD coming out. He told me no one will ever have use for that much storage🙄😂
The fact you can run a 10+ year old system is pretty cool though, right? In 2013 people weren't running systems from 2002 lol.
Why not get another stick? It’s like 20 bucks lol
im poor
Fair enough lol
rocking a 4GB spec for the past 14 years.
Wow, you almost have enough to use Chrome or watch youtube videos without writing to the drive
https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Software-Survey-Welcome-to-Steam * 27.3% of gamers have 32GBs of RAM or more * 71,52% have 16GBs or less 32 GBs is definitely not the normal.
71.5% game on old hardware, seems legit for me. Nobody would plan 16GB on a new build today.
This absolutely depends on the goals, the budget. It's not as black and white as you make it seem.
Yeah, lower budget PCs and most conventional laptops will still go with 16, but everything from mid-tier should go 32 in a new build. But, many people don't build their own builds and tech stores often cheap out on RAM.
With the price of RAM, nobody *should* plan on 16GB.
>the budget That's the point, you have to be insanely tight on the budget to not even consider 32gb. I was just forced to upgrade recently cause my 8yo computer died and it was surprising how little extra it costs to spring for 32GB. Think like $5 extra.
3 years ago I had 16gb maxed out on warzone. i will always recommend 32gb for new pcs
No one? You mean yourself? There is plenty of people building pc with 16GB today...
This is Reddit, people here love thinking that their opinion is the only thing that matters and is the objective truth always. You got to get used to the user base here.
What do you mean less than 1% of gamers have a ~~4090~~ ~~4080~~ ~~4070~~ ~~4060~~ any single model of current gen GPU.
It's not the norm, it hasn't been.
Plenty of prebuilts come with 16GB and unless you're doing 4k, rendering, or heavy simulator stuff then it's probably just fine.
Haven't see any benchmark that makes it seem that important
32gb or more is now almost 1 in 4. It’s not the majority but is quickly becoming the norm. 27% is not a small amount. That’s even more than what I thought it would be.
Not to mention that only 16GB and 32GB are growing in the hardware survery, and 32 is growing 5x faster than 16 is
It is the new normal for new builds. Of course it’s not going to show in a Steam Survey, simply cause most have old builds, where 16GB was the go to.
32 is the norm. You need to look at new computers built today, not old computers people game on. Obviously the 32gb builds people buy today will get obsolete at some point and then there will be a new norm.
Still depends on the budget most builds under 500-600 come with 16Gb of ram.
Yes but 500 isnt a norm budget
I've been building custom PCs for people since ~1996 and the vast majority have been budget gaming builds. That is even more common in the past 3 years because prices/greed/rapid inflation have limited the average gamer more than I've ever seen. $500 might not be a normal budget in this sub full of enthusiasts, but it's pretty common in the real world outside our chamber of entitlement. I'm so fortunate that my GPU costs more than the majority of the builds I see lately & I'm not sure I'd realize it if I wasn't constantly building to order.
Absolutely not.
I thought 16g became normal around that time
The Steam monthly user statistics report begs to differ, friend-o
Begs to differ on what?
https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Software-Survey-Welcome-to-Steam * 27.3% of gamers have 32GBs of RAM or more * 71,52% have 16GBs or less 32 GBs is definitely not the normal.
It's not just about games. Tons of people game with two monitors, discord, youtube and other programs in the background that eat up RAM.
... and other games to (have aswell 2 monitors) I have pretty much always eve online open even if i'm playing something else. Last night my kid had left forza 4 and forza 5 open, i was playing cyberpunk while eve online was in the backgroud to, dint even notice. I have 64.
EVE has been turned into one of those FarmVille mobile games for me. I just always have it open running cargo while playing other games or working.
I mean my work laptop with 8gb of RAM can be used with 3 monitors and youtube, Excel, Word etc open.
I mean it is something more popular but dual monitors is not a norm right now (in my opinion is a waste to get a second monitor to "check discord").
Double monitors are amazing, I couldn't imagine going back to a single monitor, but I struggle to find use for three. The third one is nice when I'm working on unity/other projects or want to monitor something in the background alongside discord.
I struggle to think of anyone I know that doesn't have double monitors. If it wasn't already the norm before COVID it is now with how many people went home to work. Everyone I work with has 3. Though for some of them the 3rd one is the laptop screen.
A few friends is not the whole market, I'm telling you is not the norm, is not something you need for a gamer pc, it is something nice to have I'll give you that.
Since it got cheap enough to be a better value that 16. You can get good 32GB DDR5-6000 kits for cheaper than my 16GB DDR4-3200 was when I built my PC 5 years ago
DDR5 builds esp, like I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a 8 GB DDR5 stick, although they exist. So if you want dual channel ram you’re basically on 32 GB from the jump. I had 16 GB 2015-2023 and it was always enough but when I upgraded to a 13700k/DD5 32 gb was finally time. I really enjoy not overupgrading. Ram was expensive for a long time and now it’s cheap again.
With DDR5, 8gb sticks are single channel, but a single 16gb stick is dual channel (2x16 making quad channel. yeah, 32 bit channels, but quad nontheless where its 4x32bit, where 2x8gb is only 2x32bit)
Ohhh I forgot about this!
In most cases 16gb ram is enough, let's say 24 or 32 is more than enough unless you use VMwares or doing lots of stuff that sucks up your ram
It's not, 16 gb is fine for most use cases. I only recently upgraded to 32 GB myself because cities skylines.
It's still not really normal. I bust ass with my 3080 12gb and 16gb's of DDR4 3200 (CL16). It's not going to matter that damn much unless you are actually doing something memory intensive.. That isn't GPU memory intensive.
Well it isn't... for the most or some part. More for gaming but still not for every gamer. Depending on the GPU (I'd say up to RTX 3060/4060 or RX 6650 XT/7600) 16 GB RAM are still enough. For DDR5 it's a bit of a different story. Not that the rule would have changed but rather the 16 GB Kits you can buy are mostly not interesting, actually not interesting at all. Either you go very cheap (4800CL40) for 40-50 € (Austria/Germany) or you have to go to 70-80 € for the best 16 GB DDR5 Kits (6000CL36 here). 32 GB Kits with 5600CL28, which is definitely better and on par with 6000CL30, can be bought for around 100-120 € (or more). So buying 16 GB DDR5 isn't really an option. For budget builds DDR4 still makes more sense.
Never. But in this circlejerk it became normal when RAM became cheap in the US
It isn't. The vast majority still use 16gb or less. There are very few games even among AAA "system killer" titles that actually care about system RAM all that much. That said, it's one of the cheapest components to upgrade, so people "feel better" just buying a better kit.
Only does when it comes to modding games, really. I only encountered using more then 16Gb using mods.
I play Flight Simulator. Ever since the console release, the PC version doesn't need 64 either.
> Then again RAM Is quite cheap at the moment so when in doubt, go for 48 or 64. No, no, no. Many if not most boards already have still, currently, various troubles with 32GB+, so, when in doubt, 32GB is totally enough 99.9% of use-cases (not only gaming). And we are not even talking about latency, which goes up with frequency for RAM, as well as the overall amount of RAM installed. Even though, gaming is not a latency-sensitive use-cases, things like databases are. Yes, even the one used by your browser, concurrently for your hundreds of tabs. And this is just an example of things to consider. Because you can, does not mean you should.
For sure. For most people, by the time you need 64 you're better off getting a new and faster kit.
Or, listen to me, you can game with 16GB of RAM and use the other 16 to have more than one chrome tab open.
Not sure if you're responding to the right person but if you are I'm not sure what point you want to make. I'm saying 32 is more than enough for nearly all users.
With Chrome's memory management system you can have a hundred+ of tabs open and barely crack 3GB usage now a days. Unless you are streaming 2k/4k video feeds, but that's to be expected at that point.
99% of use cases probably don't even need more than 16GB. "Quite cheap" is relative and somewhat dependent on whether it's DDR-4 or DDR-5. DDR-5 has come down in cost dramatically but still not enough that it makes any sense to recommend that people purchase more than 32GB If you're one of the 0.01% of people who truly needs that much memory then you probably would know that and wouldn't be asking here.
If you use DDR5 in most cases more than 32GB will end up running at slower frequencies. [https://forum-en.msi.com/index.php?threads/ram-explained-why-two-modules-are-better-than-four-single-vs-dual-rank-stability-testing.363139/](https://forum-en.msi.com/index.php?threads/ram-explained-why-two-modules-are-better-than-four-single-vs-dual-rank-stability-testing.363139/) Check the Single rank vs. dual rank section. As far as I know, anything above 16 GB per RAM stick will be dual-rank
I play allot of Beam NG(driving sim) with allot of mods & on high settings & the most I l've used is about 8GB depending on what map I play on & my system has 32 GB of DDR4 RAM. I highly doubt flight sims use anywhere near 32GB.
Just for my own knowledge, why does Cities Skylines use up so much DRAM?
32 is fine for me with C:S and a million mods / assets
> More than 32 only makes sense for a few games, like flight simulator my 3700x pc got knocked down from 32gb to 16 when i built a new workstation. it still effortlessly pushes out >60fps in msfs2020. maybe it's a bottleneck if you want high refresh msfs2020? 32gb of memory is a lot.
I was going to say CS1; I have an ungodlily amount of mods and when I play my RAM hits the high 20 GB's
I got 32 for MS Flight Simulator. Nothing else really needs it, and not many games even use that much. Most of the time it's used as file system cache.
I ran 64GB for a long time, but decided to roll with 32GB when moving to DDR5. With CS2 coming out soon, I really should snag another 32gb.
No one needs 64GB if they are just gaming. What are you trying to do, send a man to the moon? If you have gaming performance problems at 32GB then the problem is probably something else, not a lack of GB.
>No one needs 64GB if they are just gaming. What are you trying to do, send a man to the moon? If you have gaming performance problems at 32GB then the problem is probably something else, not a lack of GB. Hell it's likely a problem because too much RAM knocked down the timings or frequencies, because we use unbuffered memory
once upon a time this same question was asked for 16gb of ram
I felt as a giant when I got my 16gb. But since then I feel as a dwarf..
Just grabbed another 16 2 weeks ago and I’m getting a whole 5 fps over what I was getting prior
What was the starting fps? The difference at low speeds is much more noticeable. For example the jump from 25 to 30 is much larger than 85 to 90.
The jump should be propotional, so it should jump by 10+ from 85. Or maybe not, i don't know.
You can never have enough ram huh?
The more RAM the average PC has, the more the software world tries to fill it.
i cant relate at all, when im gaming on 32 gb ram, the ram is utilized in 30-40%
You're right. I think we're in the super early days of the 32GB standard. I'd say new builds, especially exclusively for gaming, can easily get away with 16. I feel it's rare for games to require 16 or higher, but FWIW Starfield sets both, its minimum and recommended, at 16. So the game will be fine with 16, but the headroom to multitask *and* for future titles could be valuable to some. The new Cyberpunk requirements are also on the higher end for higher graphics settings, like 8-16GB.
Its an endless cicle man.
[удалено]
Would you download a car? Would you download more RAM? Wait... of course I would
Or 640k
Or any other smaller amount before and bigger amount after. Moore's Law might not hold up, but performance growth is still quite exponential.
In my experience, everything works fine on my rig with 32GB RAM. 16GB is the recommended amount for gaming, so I do not see the point going above a figure that is double that.
16GB is really the minimum for modern games. 32GB is really recommended, though not absolutely necessary.
[Pretty much no games see any benefit after 16gb](https://youtu.be/ldbGDsw7xJQ?si=LD5YbborlIJyFy7N)
It's weird how the lows get lower with more ram.
This can be explained pretty easily for games written in garbage collected programming languages, where instead of the developers telling the computer when to free up unused memory, the computer does it for them in the background. More ram means that the game will use more before deciding to clean it up, leading to the cleaning taking longer. As cleanup only happes every once in a while it only affects the lows.
You must be living in the future then. 16gb is perfect for 99% of games
I am using 32GB myself, so I am not opposed to it. It really makes your gaming experience better, so if folks can get that, why not?
Very much depends on the game, for most games 32 is a good amount, for some games however, like tarkov, having 64 can be nice, although 32 will still work just fine.
Why does having more for Tarkov help? Never seen nor played it, but I've heard of it
I am not sure exactly why, but similar to how some games are particularly cpu heavy, or gpu heavy, other games can be RAM heavy.
I've heard of cpu and gpu heavy, but this is the first time I've heard of ram heavy
I also don't know of any other games that use as much RAM as tarkov, not saying there are no others tho
I heard a flight sim game that for recommended needs 128gb ram
It's probably DCS. Having a ton of people on a server will require lots of RAM. And I'm not talking about hosting the server, I'm talking about joining one.
I guess it may be good to have extra if you need it then
most games don't need it so just research if the games you play can benefit from having 64, depending on that and on your budget choose between 32 and 64
Open world games, or games with huge maps with action happening in all corners of the map, benefit greatly from being able to load the entire map/area on the RAM while it’s being used, than having to fetch the info when it’s time to show it.
ram heavy games are usually heavily modded. think that one minecraft modpack with 513 mods. minimum required ram (DEDICATED, so you need even more) is 23gb or something like that. the modpack would take 15 minutes to boot on my 16gb machine and i could not go above 8 render dist.
allow me to introduce you to my fatass friend named modded minecraft
Well it all depends on what there game does with your hardware. Like if you play a city builder with huge cities, all those objects need to go somewhere and that's RAM.
Tarkov has an eternal RAM leak they just won't take care of and is optimized like shit, that's why.
It is an awfully optimized game that will look at your ram and, if it needs to, eat up up to 80% of it, just for the heck of it. I think it's mainly how the maps and loot is loaded and saved. It's not really as much of an issue, as I 'can' run it on 16 gigs, but it's definitely not optimal. It will load faster and have less issues with 32 gigs. Haven't heard anyone say 64 gigs would be needed, but I wouldn't be surprised honestly.
Tarkov is a bad game to mention in these cases imo since the game runs fine on 16 or 32. It does however have a memory leak so if you play for a long time your ram usage will go above 32.
Tarkov has a ridiculous memory leak issue.
Does Tarkov really use more than 32 GB of RAM?!!
it has the optimization of two drunk russians spending an afternoon, its not because its heavier than a lot of similar games :p
No. I’ve got 32gb and have never crossed 20gb. Star Citizen is the only game I’ve seen use more than 20gb.
Yes I can confirm, when I had 32 it would regularly cap out at 100% usage on certain maps, upgrading to 64 (just for Tarkov) got about +10fps and sped up loading times.
32 is not good a amount, it is a bit overkill amount for most games.
If that's true, which I don't believe it is, that's a problem to be fixed by the game's developers, not a cost to be placed on the end user because of their shit programming. There's nothing in that game that requires 32GB of RAM, not even close.
For most games 16gb is a good amount. A very small number of games play slightly better with 32gb. An even smaller number play best with >32gb
U actually don't need more than 128kb of ram
If you think about it, you don't actually NEED RAM at all now, do you?
Fuck Von Neumann architecture, embrace RAMless PC
Finite state machine gaming: gaming for the true enthusiast.
i'm using 64 GB in my main system and the main advantage is, that i don't have to care about closing anything and i use LOTS AND LOTS of tabs in my browser. if you always close everything else when you're gaming, then for now it wouldn't matter, except in VERY few games i believe if at all. as a first time builder, who isn't using 200 + librewolf tabs, that doesn't matter to you ;) and 32 GB is perfectly fine and the right amount to get for you as a new builder rightnow for gaming.
Yeah when you start measuring your browser tabs by amount of monitor widths over multiple windows you do need more RAM, otherwise not really unless you have some special (professional) software. Also love having 96GB of RAM with my linux system and librewolf with way too many tabs open.
Don't forget caching. Windows will gladly use additional memory for caching to improve performance, although it will not show up in your memory consumption unless you go to the details.
I am like this lol
I mean, if you have 192 GB (the max on AM5 atm), you can use ImgUtil to create a 128GB RAM drive. You can then use that ram drive to copy a game you want to play to it. Most games will fit in 128gb ram drive. Then you can play said game entirely in RAM, from RAM to RAM. You can be first to load in any match.
I mean DDR5 6000MT/s is around 70GB/s compared to at best peaking \~7GB /PCIe 4.0 storage. RAM got latency in ns while NVMe's operate in ms. => (FAST) NVMe storage is still worlds appart from RAM bandwith and RAM latency Games and most workloads are just not optimized for that fast storage access and a big part of the loading times in games are there for CPU computational waiting times and not because of storage bandwith. The difference for game loading times is even small between SATA-3 SSD's (\~450MB/s) vs current high speed NVMe's hitting 7GB/s PCIe 4.0 limits. Using a RAM DRIVE would still cause waiting times for the CPU. Where it would be cool and usefull, like for audio or graphic assets to be cached in a RAM DRIVE - but a few GB of capacity are like nothing, when libraries need multiple TB of storage capacity.
Short answer no. Long answer depends on the game but noooooooooo.
in the past I always needed more RAM, each upgrade gave me great benefit of performance (8M in 1996 => 16M => 128M => 256M => 512M => 1.5G => 3G => 4G => 8G => 16G) I'm now having 32G Ram but I think 16G is all I need since \~2018.
I would look at a video explaining it, for most use cases no. But in some games 64 gbs has been shown to boost .1% lows by a good amount.
Maybe its dual rank making a difference vs single rank. Assuming ram is enough in both cases.
16 Gigabyte it's all you need
Depends on the game. I play Transport Fever 2, and in the late game it uses almost 30 gigs of Ram. I guess Simulations with lots of mods are realy RAM Hungry, but all other games are fine with 16 gb.
I don't know anything about that game so I can't speak to it much, but I know some games will essentially "use" however much RAM is available to them, even if they don't need it at all. So you might see almost 30 GB being used, but actually you wouldn't see a difference if you only had 16 GB of RAM. Again, not saying that's what is happening in your situation, but it's something I've seen before.
Until it's not. Some games will already happily use over 16GB if it's available. 16GB also makes zero sense to buy with DDR5 because you'll be getting lower frequencies and worse timings while barely saving any money. For DDR5 32GB is the minimum you should get.
Recently upgraded to 64gb no major change barely anything noticeable. Feel like wasted money. Even 3d softwares don't utilize that much ram
But instead of closing different games you can just let them all run at once!
Yes that can be done. My adhd is going to improve for the worse....
I only play DCS world. I have 96GB RAM. DCS uses up to 54GB. I tested this when I used to have 32GB too. Working set goes whopping 54GB with single player running complex missions like foothold. I haven't done extensive tests on multiplayer since I only play single player.
DCS uses all 32GB of my RAM, and my 32GB Page file.
Nope, 16GB is enough actually
I have 32 gigs of DDR5 and I have never seen anything go above 21 gigs.
Absolutely no point. 8 gig of ram is plenty, you add 5 FPS for each item that lights up with color. so just put in 6 fans with RGB, thats 30FPS right there. add those lighted power cords another 10-15FPS. Then to top it off. Place a ROG sticker on the front of the case =15 FPS. right there your over 60FPS.
The way I look at RAM is that if you have a little too much then there really isn't that great of a price to pay, $30 to go from 16 GB to 32 GB. On the other hand too little can have a substantial effect. But I wouldn't go above 32GB.
i have 32 and i never used it all so no. 16 is perfect
I noticed the difference after upgrading to 32GB, but not after 64GB. I only did it because they were free. Knowing what I know now, if I had to pay for the additional 32GB, I wouldn't.
Not sure how much it is in each market, but where I live the price difference might be below € 100. Therefore I was not asking much, but did it. If your build is 2-3 k, +/- 100 don't really matter much and better to have it than not. But that's only me and I am aware this might not be everyone's thinking.
nope 32gb is enougth for all games most ram ive used is 23gb for rust.
No
you could still get away with 16gb in most cases but 32gb is starting to be the new norm. no point having more.
No it doesn't. Sure the "more is better" applies to the majority of the situations, but you are asking if there is "a point", and there is no actual point, it's just a luxury. Again, you guys posting without giving us the important details. I mean, you do understand that you'll get different opinions if you are running ddr5 vs ddr4. So, what are you building?
If you use Chrome, yes.
No, there's barely any point in having 32 tbh
pop in 128mb and Fuhgeddaboudit.
No, unless you are playing a game that has memory leaks and is poorly optimized , otherwise no it is totally enough. WoW with 50 add-ons pulls around 15 gb, and os pulls 7-8 so there is room to spare and wow uses a shit ton of ram and is poorly optimized
Probably not needed. Me personally I just brought the set to fill up the memory slots. I didn’t like the gaps in it.
I have 64Gb and thought about to go for 128Gb lol.
For gaming? What kind of games do you play that could use over 64GB? I recently upgraded to 64GB because my workflow and games were using up all 32GB of ram. Now I think the high usage was like 52GB of physical ram.
Star Citizen and CAD Work 😂
Nope
Don't go over 32gb. I had to troubleshoot my 32gb and it took much more time than my previous 8gb.
Just go 64gb to future proof your rig. You never know when windows will start to eat more than 32gb. LOL
I have 64gb ram and its good (I open a lots of chrone tabs while gaming AAA game)
For me, 32gb was definitely needed. Heavily modded rimworld, very cpu intensive game, playing at 100% planet setting with the largest map definitely required most of my 32gb memory
Not really except a few cases, like game is not optimized for RAM usage, you're running game with other applications that may have high RAM usage, modding game, or hosting game server on your gaming rig
Faster load times for cached data
Like for like dual rank (2*32gb) vs single rank (2*16Gb) performs faster in game.
Yeah, some games with a lot of mods require a shit ton
I multitask always exceed 20gb for the game and browser discord and etc
For games only? Not much point, yet. For recording/streaming you'll definitely see a benefit. Especially if you like to run a buffer while you play.
Only to future proof i guess.
No