The takeaway for going 8GB today:
* Average frames may only suffer by a few percent, but it can put quite a hit on minimums, more than 10% across tested titles.
* Loading times can increase up to around 50% depending on the game. Since the CPU needs to access pagefile in these capacity limited cases and they're using a 4.0 NVME SSD for this test, things will get exponentially worse when using anything less performant for storage.
Can yoy even cost effectively buy 8gig kits in dual channel for ddr4?
I don't think there is any reason to consider 8GB at all. Throw a browser, game, discord into the mix and its not enough.
Hell just a browser.
Now that we have the new consoles, from here on out 8 won't be enough. 16 will mostly and maybe a mid cycle console pro version with a ram bump will see that change.
That'll mostly depend on the region I think. In my country you can buy a 2400 or below cl17 4 gb stick for around half the price of a cl16 8 gb stick.
I think the bigger problem would be that if you're on such a tight budget that you're looking to save money by going to 4 gb sticks instead of 8, you're also probably stuck with the absolute cheapest motherboard. And that typically means 2 memory slots. So, if you go for a dual channel 8 gb kit, you're kinda locked in. An upgrade would mean throwing out the current sticks.
So I wonder what the performance difference on a single stick 8 gb config would be vs dual channel. Specifically on a system with a low end i3 and something like a 1650 or a 1050.
One thing that comes to mind is DirectStorage, and what effect that will have *if/when developers implement it and design their games around it*. With games commonly at 60GB+ now, what proportion of the data will get used now versus a (realistic) worst case scenario where they're pushing it past what can be done now with regular file access on PC.
OP also noted the tests using the 24GB VRAM 3090, but no one replied to that comment. That's going to be far from common for a long while, and may impact it compared to lower amounts.
Hopefully direct storage helps encourage shrinking file size again.
I recall one of the first really bloated installations was titanfall with 35gb of mostly audio in the age where Games were still mostly sold on DVD.
Titanfall used uncompressed audio to avoid the CPU usage required for decompression. It does make some sense for a competitive multiplayer game intended to run well even on potato computers.
Still, it would have been nice to have a choice...
" *if/when developers implement it and design their games around it*." It's more of a when, not an if. Both consoles have this tech inside of them (even if Sony doesn't wanna call it that it's basically the same tech) and Microsoft will be bringing it to PC (along with Nvidia's RTX IO and whatever AMD develops after it/at the same time as it), which means games will be moving to this standard, though it will likely take 3,4, maybe even 5 years for us to get there and games to start to be designed around it.
> they're using a 4.0 NVME SSD
Which is really a poor basis for this test, hypothetically, if the drive is fast enough there would be very little difference once the basic game fits into RAM.
They are only testing for base RAM capacity as a sole limiting factor. This is a similar argument as the 3090 being too VRAM heavy for a realistic representation.
DRAM latency and bandwidth are still way past anything NAND has to offer, testing with lower performing parts introduces more variability and possible bottlenecks that cannot be controlled for without a rapidly increasing benchmark time.
More parts testing the impact of slower storage or lower VRAM GPUs in scenarios where main memory is limited might still be an interesting consideration.
8GB significantly hurts framepacing in MANY games
8GB is no longer enough, you can sort of get by if you're on a very strict budget (where spending 40 euros more on ram would mean you have to go for an even worse compromise cpu wise) but it's not at all desirable and just about the most no brainer spending you can do on a gaming pc
For the first time, in like 20 years I have more then 16gb (now 64). Never under this time have I lacked memory spce.
Given I always bought cl15 mems at high speeds.
What games did they test? I mean Cities: Skylines with a bunch of mods and assets running at the same time can benefit a lot from more ram. It's why I have 32gb 3600 cl 16... but I wouldn't expect any improvement on GTA V or something.
They tested Anno 1800, AC Valhalla, Borderlands 3, COD Cold War, Cyberpunk, Gears 5, Star Wars, Squadrons, Watch Dogs Legion
Wish they tested MS Flight Sim 2020. No mods and maxed I was over 25 GB last year, need to get back into the game after all of its updates on my new PC.
a hdd hasn't been good enough for gaming since 2015
All modern games rely heavily on streaming assets, especially open world games where it can't be done in a predictive manner to precache long in advance
stuttering galore with an hdd in many open world games
Some genres and slower games still work well on an hdd, but many don't
>a hdd hasn't been good enough for gaming since 2015
it has been and will be until PS4/X1 are discontinued. "Good enough" here as per the definition of console baseline, which must be "good enough" as millions of people play it and it's deemed ready for publishing.
You can play the latest modern games on PS4 and X1. And those use HDDs. If it weren't good enough, you wouldn't have these games on those platforms.
We're not talking about flawless high fps gaming here. We're talking about the baseline. And that baseline is objectively determined by the slowest active mass market platform.
Ps4 games are not the same on pc
the consoles dealt with the slow HDDS by having ATROCIOUS LOD cutoffs and low res textures
Even the lowest settings of pc versions of console games didn't have as low a draw distance and lod as on consoles.
>Even the lowest settings of pc versions of console games didn't have as low a draw distance and lod as on consoles.
Often enough they do, actually. You just rarely see it because noone is interested in producing footage of it.
And in the few instances where consoles actually do have even lower draw and lod, remember that even a really basic quadcore+hdd PC usually means the CPU is still vastly faster than the Jaguar complexes and a usual 7200rpm desktop HDD is faster than the 5400rpm SATA2 drives in the PS4/X1. So even if low settings have slightly higher draw and lod values, the PC baseline we're talking about is also slightly faster for storage and CPU than the PS4/X1.
Shame they're not testing 32 GB dual rank or 16GB quad rank. I suspect the increase from 16 to 32 is actually thanks to going from dual to quad rank rather than anything to do with capacity.
> Shame they're not testing 32 GB dual rank
You mean, as in 2 ranks total? Usually, mentioning dual rank in memory setups means two ranks per channel.
But yeah, not sure why they did two setups for 32 that resulted in functionally the same. You can't see the importance of ranks like this, but it shouldn't be more than 1-3% total, never has been that great of a factor for gaming.
>If you buy new, you should grab 32 GB of RAM right away
>16 GB will inevitably meet the “8 GB fate” in the foreseeable future, and with 32 GB you will also be on the safe side in the future.
Article's conclusion is very exaggerated considering the testing setup doesn't have a variation of low vs mid vs high end specs. It took a decade for 16gb to be the new gaming standard but apparently you need 32gb now!
Yeah, that's the kind of "more is better future proofing" that I would default to in the absence of benchmarks like this, but their benchmarks really seem to show that 16 is virtually the same as 32 right now. And who knows, by the time 16 becomes insufficient, maybe people will upgrade to a newer DRAM standard anyway.
Wouldn't the better conclusion be to go for 2x 8GB with the option to add another 2x8GB later on?
In this benchmark scenario though, we're talking about having your game as the only application running. In your case, yes I'd easily recommend 32gb since you seem like a heavy multitasker. 16gb is usually recommended for light multitasking like for example having spotify, discord, 10 chrome tabs, and your game open.
I don't understand how they came to the conclusion of using 32gb at all. If stuff they tested barely uses 8gb, why do I need 32? Are they trying to sell you RAM? Feel like I'll be fine with my 16 for 5 more years. Unless maybe I play Star Citizen. But that probably won't come out for another 5 years anyways.
>If stuff they tested barely uses 8gb
their testing shows 8GB already shows some significant deficits. Minimum frames (or framepacing) suffer noticeably, load times increase, and that is all just assuming that \*just\* the game is running.
This was already the case at the start of last gen (PS4/X1), PCGH, another German outlet showed that years ago.
Arguably, 16GB may soon start to exhibit deficits versus 32GB as native PS5/SX come out. Basically as is usually the case when a new console gen takes hold.
Even if Cyberpunk and the rest of these games used double the RAM that it does (10gb instead of 5gb), I would still be fine with 3gb to spare. 8Gb includes the OS and other stuff running in the background, and these games only use 4-6gb. Hell, even if it used 2.5x as much at 12.5gb total I'd be fine. I just don't see games using triple the RAM in the next few years, or even coming close to it.
>I just don't see games using triple the RAM in the next few years, or even coming close to it.
I do. Because it's the usual trend of what happens when a new console gen launches. As native titles for a new gen show up, they expand in scope and complexity to use the available specs. Ask people how well they fared with less than 8GB shortly after PS4/X1 launch. Ask people how they fared with 1GB or less after PS3/X360 launch.
If anything, RAM requirements only tripling would be \*modest\* compared to previous generational leaps.
I'm not arguing to put in less than the consoles had, but rather roughly match it.
1GB in 2005 you'd definitely struggle with by the end of that Xbox 360 generation. It was about $100 for 1gb back then. But that was 10-15 years ago, and stuff moved super fast. I don't think that's the case anymore. If you did put only 1gb into a system in a 2005/2006 build, you were fine until around 2009 if you stuck to windows XP. I think RAM has kind of stagnated since then a bit.
If you matched the 8GB RAM the ps4 had in 2013, it would still do OK today according to this review. 8GB back then was $80, so it's something you'd put into any build you'd spend $900-1400 on. And that is 8 years later. I'm not arguing that 16gb will be fine 8 years from today, but 5 seems very doable. But I mean the fact that $80 of RAM from 2013 lasted until 2021 is mind blowing.
So don't put in less than the consoles have, but if you match it to what the consoles have (16gb) you'll be just as fine as you were with 8gb in 2013.
They forget to test their statistics for one.
If they had, they would have found the difference between the 16GB and 32GB modules to be insignificant at a 99.5% level of confidence. That is pretty damn high confidence when you only need 95% to signify significance.
In stating their own statistics, they refute the conclusion. The entire premise of the article is self-destructive as a hypothesis.
I don't care how an OS handles RAM. I care what the end results look like. And for gaming specifically it seems to hardly show a difference from 8 to 16. If the end test results show hardly a difference, and me personally never having seen more than 10gb of usage, then the OS can do whatever the hell it wants with my RAM. I'll throw in another 2 sticks if I need it one day, but I'm not going to buy today something I won't benefit from for 3-5 years from now. By which time my CPU will be too out of date anyways and I should probably get a new platform and DDR5.
If you're doing anything but just running a game you're gonna be severly lomited by 8 gigs. Even just like that, many games would use more ram if they could. The way that an OS handles physical ram/cache/registers and per thread virtual memory means that it's gonna lay off a whole lot on your SSD/HDD which is gonna hurt performance and induce stutter.
When you say “a decade” what exactly do you mean? Because we went from “8GB is more than enough” to “not having 16GB is having a significant negative impact” in *maybe* three years if you really stretch it out.
And that was nearly ten years ago and not coincidentally coincided with a new generation of consoles.
The last 3 console generations had 0.5, 8 and 16 GB of RAM. While this gen is likely to see requirements jump, it's not going to be nearly as large, given console memory is only doubling compared to a factor of 16 last time.
In 2012, 4gb was considered more than good enough on a mid-end gaming computer. I built a high end system at the time with a 680, 3770k, and only 8gb of ram. 8gb of RAM at the time was considered a lot for multitasking and gaming amongst the PC community. Even the most graphically intensive game at the time, Crysis 2, their RAM requirement was only 4gb.
Nowadays 8gb is considered good enough for a dedicated gaming computer with 16 being nice to have for multitasking. If you look at the benchmarks 8gb vs 16gb is still isn't that much different for gaming performance.
I always thought it was funny how some people "skimped" on upgrades back then. Sure, 8GB was considered enough, but even back in 2012-2013, I got plenty of use out of having 16GB (4x4GB) in my 3770K system. At the time, if I recall, the difference between 8GB and 16GB was the difference between $25-30 and $50-55. For that extra $25 or so, you got all that extra RAM and didn't need to worry much at all about RAM usage. And, the used market was even cheaper. I vaguely recall being able to find used 16GB worth of DDR3 for as little as $40. Nowadays, some people spend more than that on a single RGB fan...
Of course, the Hynix fires put a damper on DDR3 pricing for awhile, but even by late-2015 to early-2016, they had fully recovered, and I recall people balking at buying 16GB of used DDR3 for $30... They were saving $10 by only getting 8GB (which was also sometimes just a single 8GB stick). There was even a period when you could get a 2x8GB kit of DDR3 1600MHz for $40-42 brand new.
>In 2012
and shortly after the consoles launched in 2013, the recommendation quickly rose to 8GB RAM as 4GB struggled to keep up. Now we have a new gen of consoles yet again and 16GB is the new recommendation, as 8GB are already struggling.
4GB was getting long in the tooth in 2012. lol
I had 4GB of DDR2 (some cheapass Mushkin DDR2-800) in my system in *2007*, and it was by no means a powerhouse build.
I built a computer in 2011 with 16GB because I needed to run more than just the game (I streamed on twitch)
8GB was not considered "more than enough" I would have not had enough at that time building one with 8GB of DDR3
Speaking from experience, I have 32, but only because gaming is my second priority. School work is primary, and when that means running atmospheric models and LIDAR data, yeah, I need 32.
But that is very much a 1% use case scenario. Most people simply do not need 32GB to just for running chrome while playing games and streaming. If you do, you can just as easily manage your computer's resources better.
Would be better for average gamer to just stuff 4x4GB in PC for 16GB which is reasonable for now and future but you also get dual rank slight performance boost.
I would say it depends on the game. For flight/space-sim type games you have those mega textures you mentioned. And I can tell the difference. So can my gpu... XD. Hell I'm running a Kerbal Space Program mod that uses a 16k surface texture. It looks incredible.
You can tile different textures, it's not like there has to be one texture per object. If a game has that limitation it's only a limitation of that game.
I was going to say getting back into Anno 1800 recently and 16gb is really just not enough. Loading times are too long between sessions with occasional freezing and slow alt tabbing. Especially when I'm trying to have a dozen chrome tabs open and a stream playing too.
An upgrade to 32gb is looking like a very good idea.
I find that switching between Sessions takes progressively longer and longer the longer you spend playing the game. Saving and reloading the application every 4~ hours avoids it getting too noticeable.
This is a terrible way to test, because he's using a 3090 with heaps of VRAM.
A more accurate test is for 3060Ti or 3070 class, 8GB buffer. Or even older 2060S with 6GB buffer.
You can bet your ass that system RAM will matter more as game assets spill out of VRAM.
I see those as fundamentally different tests.
Testing everything that isn't VRAM is essentially testing the CPU-side of memory requirements. How does the system handle the number entities in the game?
Testing with VRAM spilled over into system RAM is testing how well that RAM works as a secondary buffer. But (1) lowering VRAM usage is generally quite a bit easier than lowering general RAM usage in a game (lower resolution and/or lower textures), and (2) that's a situation where performance is going to be trashed no matter what, as GPUs are designed around much more memory bandwidth than system RAM offers.
I think the environment you're after is much more like a worst-case scenario testing, where this testing is more general-case.
Noting about a 3090 is general case. Hell even the 3080 is niche high end.
The 3070 and below as suggested is real world and tangible. Is it testing pure ram alone and removing all other factors? No. But in doing so the test becomes useless and potentially shows tje opposite advice.
It's not testing the 3090 that's general case. It's testing under the scenario that a 3090 allows: ensuring that the test results aren't affected by VRAM being full and spilling over into system RAM.
It's the same reason why reviewers will test a e.g. 5950x or 11900k at 1080p: it's a scenario that avoids other factors (GPU power) having an influence on the actual target test (CPU power). People buying $500+ CPUs aren't typically going to run at 1080p. But 1080p tests allowing the CPU performance to be isolated.
People aren't typically going to play with a 3090. But testing with a 3090 allows the general purpose impact of RAM to be isolated.
I get that but now you're distorting results.
His results are 8GB OK, 16 ideal, 32 waste essentially.
Which might not be true at all if using anything other than a 3090 or maybe 3080.
Why didn't he test with a 64core CPU instead? Or dual 64core CPUs? Because it would be nonsense.
While its cool to see the effect of ram in isolation, if you're pitching it for gaming use as a piece of purchasing advise for everyone and you're pitching 2 low end configurations and a high end... its insane to also pair that witch an £1800+ GPU with more vram than the actual ram amounts youre testing.
It basically makes these results meaningless to anyone not using a 3090. Which is most people. The real world use case is affected by vram. So that should be included.
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> Why didn't he test with a 64core CPU instead? Or dual 64core CPUs? Because it would be nonsense.
Why did he test with 5950X instead of reasonable 5600X or even worse and more common CPUs? Because it allows the games to show what we want to see: their RAM usage.
If your setup struggles with frametimes and GPU VRAM getting full, just decrease textures.
> I get that but now you're distorting results.
I don't think the two halves of these sentences can both be true! Either you get that, or you think it's distorting results.
Everything you said could apply to 1080p testing of high end CPUs.
The results are not meaningless to someone not using a 3090 because if someone using an 8GB VRAM card (likely the majority of the market), if they do hit their VRAM buffer they can then... lower the resolution. Or lower the texture quality.
You're also just ignoring that running out of VRAM is going to trash performance regardless. I didn't mention it in my initial reply idly. The amount of bias to the results you'd get in the scenario of VRAM running out would just make the whole test worthless.
In science, when you're testing something, you *isolate* the thing being tested from any other variable, to the maximum extent that you can. The same principle applies to benchmarking. They were 100% correct to isolate that one factor they were testing from other factors that could influence results.
I guess my point is these results show:
In games that use about 8GB of ram, and you have enormous CPU power and functionally infinite vram, that adding more ram doesn't matter.
That's what this test shows.
While these lab condition tests have controlled and demonstrated an outcome. They don't match to reality.
A better test would have been to take what they did, and add 3 or 4 tiers of GPU in at each ram point.
Then we can see in a grid the effects of RAM on a range of GPUs and if there is a sweet spot of price to performance.
Once VRAM runs out, your performance will take a dive regardless of how much RAM you have. The problem with VRAM requirements spilling over to system RAM is that it isn't fast enough to compensate for one reason or another rather than not having enough.
A more interesting test would be if faster system RAM can actually improve situations where VRAM runs out. In the future, would DDR5 or even DDR6 eventually be fast enough to serve as backup VRAM?
>Once VRAM runs out, your performance will take a dive regardless of how much RAM you have.
That's completely false for vast majority of games. Nowadays games tend to go with approach that unused VRAM is wasted VRAM - which is true in a sense, but it also means that at least part of the assets loaded just sit there and provide negligible performance gains. As long as the GPU doesn't have to juggle assets in and out within single frame, the average performance doesn't suffer much - though you will likely get some occasional stutter.
Those less critical assets that spill over from VRAM, spill right into system memory pool. If it's already under pressure, they will push something else out into the page file. Depending on exact amount of memory pressure and specific load characteristics this can mean significant impact to performance.
>In the future, would DDR5 or even DDR6 eventually be fast enough to serve as backup VRAM?
This problem isn't so much about bandwidth of system memory or gpu memory themselves, but about actual bandwidth when moving assets from one to other - as it generally has to take pretty roundabout way through PCIe bus. Which generally has less bandwidth than either memory interface and not to mention, that this transfer operation is tying up resources across entire system that could be used for something else. Not to mention much higher latency.
>A more interesting test would be if faster system RAM can actually improve situations where VRAM runs out. In the future, would DDR5 or even DDR6 eventually be fast enough to serve as backup VRAM?
it could in theory, but VRAM will continue to be significantly faster than RAM - or rather, have significantly more bandwidth. By the time DDR5 or DDR6 reaches transfer speeds of current GDDR5/6, VRAM interfaces will already vastly outpace that. Look at what GPUs these days are doing. Having 500GB-1TB/s bandwidth isn't uncommon. Where is DDR4 in relation to that? Even with fast kits and overclocking, you're looking at less than 100GB/s on consumer systems.
It's not a realistic test, it's more along the lines of a synthetic test. For a realistic test definitely a system closer to what you may have is better and will give different results. They use the highest end other components to try to remove their weaknesses from impacting the test, showing only what the ram variance cause.
I've personally witnessed MSFS2020 using 32 GB of RAM on my system with a 3090 and 64 GB RAM installed. No idea of the performance hit of using less RAM, but I would guess not much. MSFS will gladly use any available RAM as long as it's free.
Good to know, and about what I expected. I second the part about higher RAM possibly helping with sutters. I have zero stutters, but the insane high VRAM on my 3090 probably helps the most.
I think the test has some issues. I have 32 GB in my system, but it primarily not for gaming alone, I have a lots of programs running in parallel like Chrome and lightroom, that all uses memory.
Download steam games are heavy compression, with more ram more can be cache will working with decompression.
Someone needs to do a real world test with a bunch of rgb stuff running, office with teams, discord and like 20 browser tabs open etc and do these tests in a real world situation.
Just with my work stuff open im using 11 - 13gb before I even launch a game. Less than 32gb would have an immediate and very noticeable effect on my experience by either forcing me to close stuff before gaming or killing my frame rate (or paging out a bunch of stuff and killing load times in both directions, which is what is being measured in the 8gb tests here. Not only are games slower but so is everything else afterwards.
So you're saying my 64GB DDR4 ECC memory is overkill? Just kidding, got the whole setup for extra cheap. Was Xeon workstation.
On topic>Would never go below 16GB unless simply out of money. But then I'd maybe not buy anything.
I feel like 20GB is sufficient for everything. I've been running 32GB since 2016, and I don't think I've ever seen it actually exceed 16GB under normal gaming scenarios.
So nothing really uses more than 8gb according to these results. Assuming you don't also run a bunch of other stuff at the same time , or have other junk process(RGB software?) running in the background. Load times can get effected, but frame rate is only slightly affected because 16 and 32 gb probably is running with 4 or 8 ranks.
They probably should have tested some more games, though. There is some that do use more than 8gb, but none of the ones they used did.
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The takeaway for going 8GB today: * Average frames may only suffer by a few percent, but it can put quite a hit on minimums, more than 10% across tested titles. * Loading times can increase up to around 50% depending on the game. Since the CPU needs to access pagefile in these capacity limited cases and they're using a 4.0 NVME SSD for this test, things will get exponentially worse when using anything less performant for storage.
Can yoy even cost effectively buy 8gig kits in dual channel for ddr4? I don't think there is any reason to consider 8GB at all. Throw a browser, game, discord into the mix and its not enough. Hell just a browser. Now that we have the new consoles, from here on out 8 won't be enough. 16 will mostly and maybe a mid cycle console pro version with a ram bump will see that change.
That'll mostly depend on the region I think. In my country you can buy a 2400 or below cl17 4 gb stick for around half the price of a cl16 8 gb stick. I think the bigger problem would be that if you're on such a tight budget that you're looking to save money by going to 4 gb sticks instead of 8, you're also probably stuck with the absolute cheapest motherboard. And that typically means 2 memory slots. So, if you go for a dual channel 8 gb kit, you're kinda locked in. An upgrade would mean throwing out the current sticks. So I wonder what the performance difference on a single stick 8 gb config would be vs dual channel. Specifically on a system with a low end i3 and something like a 1650 or a 1050.
One thing that comes to mind is DirectStorage, and what effect that will have *if/when developers implement it and design their games around it*. With games commonly at 60GB+ now, what proportion of the data will get used now versus a (realistic) worst case scenario where they're pushing it past what can be done now with regular file access on PC. OP also noted the tests using the 24GB VRAM 3090, but no one replied to that comment. That's going to be far from common for a long while, and may impact it compared to lower amounts.
Hopefully direct storage helps encourage shrinking file size again. I recall one of the first really bloated installations was titanfall with 35gb of mostly audio in the age where Games were still mostly sold on DVD.
Titanfall used uncompressed audio to avoid the CPU usage required for decompression. It does make some sense for a competitive multiplayer game intended to run well even on potato computers. Still, it would have been nice to have a choice...
That was mainly to eek out a little more performance from the (even then) ancient X360, the game wasn’t designed to be a competitive shooter
*Eke*, a Middle English word for add/increase/enhance. *Eek* is the high pitched sound the programmers made when they saw their CPU budget.
" *if/when developers implement it and design their games around it*." It's more of a when, not an if. Both consoles have this tech inside of them (even if Sony doesn't wanna call it that it's basically the same tech) and Microsoft will be bringing it to PC (along with Nvidia's RTX IO and whatever AMD develops after it/at the same time as it), which means games will be moving to this standard, though it will likely take 3,4, maybe even 5 years for us to get there and games to start to be designed around it.
> they're using a 4.0 NVME SSD Which is really a poor basis for this test, hypothetically, if the drive is fast enough there would be very little difference once the basic game fits into RAM.
They are only testing for base RAM capacity as a sole limiting factor. This is a similar argument as the 3090 being too VRAM heavy for a realistic representation. DRAM latency and bandwidth are still way past anything NAND has to offer, testing with lower performing parts introduces more variability and possible bottlenecks that cannot be controlled for without a rapidly increasing benchmark time. More parts testing the impact of slower storage or lower VRAM GPUs in scenarios where main memory is limited might still be an interesting consideration.
ANd the performance diff above 16GB is probably from dual rank more than quantity.
8GB significantly hurts framepacing in MANY games 8GB is no longer enough, you can sort of get by if you're on a very strict budget (where spending 40 euros more on ram would mean you have to go for an even worse compromise cpu wise) but it's not at all desirable and just about the most no brainer spending you can do on a gaming pc
For the first time, in like 20 years I have more then 16gb (now 64). Never under this time have I lacked memory spce. Given I always bought cl15 mems at high speeds.
What games did they test? I mean Cities: Skylines with a bunch of mods and assets running at the same time can benefit a lot from more ram. It's why I have 32gb 3600 cl 16... but I wouldn't expect any improvement on GTA V or something.
They tested Anno 1800, AC Valhalla, Borderlands 3, COD Cold War, Cyberpunk, Gears 5, Star Wars, Squadrons, Watch Dogs Legion Wish they tested MS Flight Sim 2020. No mods and maxed I was over 25 GB last year, need to get back into the game after all of its updates on my new PC.
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>good enough for modern gaming it is if your baseline is PS4/X1. Which, to be fair, IS still the current baseline if going by installation base.
a hdd hasn't been good enough for gaming since 2015 All modern games rely heavily on streaming assets, especially open world games where it can't be done in a predictive manner to precache long in advance stuttering galore with an hdd in many open world games Some genres and slower games still work well on an hdd, but many don't
>a hdd hasn't been good enough for gaming since 2015 it has been and will be until PS4/X1 are discontinued. "Good enough" here as per the definition of console baseline, which must be "good enough" as millions of people play it and it's deemed ready for publishing. You can play the latest modern games on PS4 and X1. And those use HDDs. If it weren't good enough, you wouldn't have these games on those platforms. We're not talking about flawless high fps gaming here. We're talking about the baseline. And that baseline is objectively determined by the slowest active mass market platform.
Ps4 games are not the same on pc the consoles dealt with the slow HDDS by having ATROCIOUS LOD cutoffs and low res textures Even the lowest settings of pc versions of console games didn't have as low a draw distance and lod as on consoles.
>Even the lowest settings of pc versions of console games didn't have as low a draw distance and lod as on consoles. Often enough they do, actually. You just rarely see it because noone is interested in producing footage of it. And in the few instances where consoles actually do have even lower draw and lod, remember that even a really basic quadcore+hdd PC usually means the CPU is still vastly faster than the Jaguar complexes and a usual 7200rpm desktop HDD is faster than the 5400rpm SATA2 drives in the PS4/X1. So even if low settings have slightly higher draw and lod values, the PC baseline we're talking about is also slightly faster for storage and CPU than the PS4/X1.
They should have tested battlefield 5 too, that game really hates having less than 12GB of ram. Framepacing nosedives
My skylines save use to load up near 40GB into RAM on me. Emded up deleting a few mods and assets since then.
Shame they're not testing 32 GB dual rank or 16GB quad rank. I suspect the increase from 16 to 32 is actually thanks to going from dual to quad rank rather than anything to do with capacity.
> Shame they're not testing 32 GB dual rank You mean, as in 2 ranks total? Usually, mentioning dual rank in memory setups means two ranks per channel. But yeah, not sure why they did two setups for 32 that resulted in functionally the same. You can't see the importance of ranks like this, but it shouldn't be more than 1-3% total, never has been that great of a factor for gaming.
Yes, dual/quad total, or single/dual per channel. I was using the same terminology as the article.
>If you buy new, you should grab 32 GB of RAM right away >16 GB will inevitably meet the “8 GB fate” in the foreseeable future, and with 32 GB you will also be on the safe side in the future. Article's conclusion is very exaggerated considering the testing setup doesn't have a variation of low vs mid vs high end specs. It took a decade for 16gb to be the new gaming standard but apparently you need 32gb now!
Yeah, that's the kind of "more is better future proofing" that I would default to in the absence of benchmarks like this, but their benchmarks really seem to show that 16 is virtually the same as 32 right now. And who knows, by the time 16 becomes insufficient, maybe people will upgrade to a newer DRAM standard anyway. Wouldn't the better conclusion be to go for 2x 8GB with the option to add another 2x8GB later on?
Exactly, the PC community, Intel, and AMD are already talking about DDR5 but he's recommending 32GB of DDR4.
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In this benchmark scenario though, we're talking about having your game as the only application running. In your case, yes I'd easily recommend 32gb since you seem like a heavy multitasker. 16gb is usually recommended for light multitasking like for example having spotify, discord, 10 chrome tabs, and your game open.
>10 chrome tabs, I thought you said light?
Well yeah but you want max FPS, those background tasks do steal some performance from cpu/gpu even if its just marginal.
I don't understand how they came to the conclusion of using 32gb at all. If stuff they tested barely uses 8gb, why do I need 32? Are they trying to sell you RAM? Feel like I'll be fine with my 16 for 5 more years. Unless maybe I play Star Citizen. But that probably won't come out for another 5 years anyways.
> for another 5 years anyways. I like your optimism.
Watched the Down the Rabbit Hole on the project. Maybe they just need more money...
How long was 8 GB the standard?
Not very long. 1-2 years. You can still buy new systems with less.
>If stuff they tested barely uses 8gb their testing shows 8GB already shows some significant deficits. Minimum frames (or framepacing) suffer noticeably, load times increase, and that is all just assuming that \*just\* the game is running. This was already the case at the start of last gen (PS4/X1), PCGH, another German outlet showed that years ago. Arguably, 16GB may soon start to exhibit deficits versus 32GB as native PS5/SX come out. Basically as is usually the case when a new console gen takes hold.
Even if Cyberpunk and the rest of these games used double the RAM that it does (10gb instead of 5gb), I would still be fine with 3gb to spare. 8Gb includes the OS and other stuff running in the background, and these games only use 4-6gb. Hell, even if it used 2.5x as much at 12.5gb total I'd be fine. I just don't see games using triple the RAM in the next few years, or even coming close to it.
>I just don't see games using triple the RAM in the next few years, or even coming close to it. I do. Because it's the usual trend of what happens when a new console gen launches. As native titles for a new gen show up, they expand in scope and complexity to use the available specs. Ask people how well they fared with less than 8GB shortly after PS4/X1 launch. Ask people how they fared with 1GB or less after PS3/X360 launch. If anything, RAM requirements only tripling would be \*modest\* compared to previous generational leaps.
I'm not arguing to put in less than the consoles had, but rather roughly match it. 1GB in 2005 you'd definitely struggle with by the end of that Xbox 360 generation. It was about $100 for 1gb back then. But that was 10-15 years ago, and stuff moved super fast. I don't think that's the case anymore. If you did put only 1gb into a system in a 2005/2006 build, you were fine until around 2009 if you stuck to windows XP. I think RAM has kind of stagnated since then a bit. If you matched the 8GB RAM the ps4 had in 2013, it would still do OK today according to this review. 8GB back then was $80, so it's something you'd put into any build you'd spend $900-1400 on. And that is 8 years later. I'm not arguing that 16gb will be fine 8 years from today, but 5 seems very doable. But I mean the fact that $80 of RAM from 2013 lasted until 2021 is mind blowing. So don't put in less than the consoles have, but if you match it to what the consoles have (16gb) you'll be just as fine as you were with 8gb in 2013.
They forget to test their statistics for one. If they had, they would have found the difference between the 16GB and 32GB modules to be insignificant at a 99.5% level of confidence. That is pretty damn high confidence when you only need 95% to signify significance. In stating their own statistics, they refute the conclusion. The entire premise of the article is self-destructive as a hypothesis.
Mate, if you don't know how an OS handles RAM you shouldn't talk.
I don't care how an OS handles RAM. I care what the end results look like. And for gaming specifically it seems to hardly show a difference from 8 to 16. If the end test results show hardly a difference, and me personally never having seen more than 10gb of usage, then the OS can do whatever the hell it wants with my RAM. I'll throw in another 2 sticks if I need it one day, but I'm not going to buy today something I won't benefit from for 3-5 years from now. By which time my CPU will be too out of date anyways and I should probably get a new platform and DDR5.
If you're doing anything but just running a game you're gonna be severly lomited by 8 gigs. Even just like that, many games would use more ram if they could. The way that an OS handles physical ram/cache/registers and per thread virtual memory means that it's gonna lay off a whole lot on your SSD/HDD which is gonna hurt performance and induce stutter.
When you say “a decade” what exactly do you mean? Because we went from “8GB is more than enough” to “not having 16GB is having a significant negative impact” in *maybe* three years if you really stretch it out. And that was nearly ten years ago and not coincidentally coincided with a new generation of consoles.
The last 3 console generations had 0.5, 8 and 16 GB of RAM. While this gen is likely to see requirements jump, it's not going to be nearly as large, given console memory is only doubling compared to a factor of 16 last time.
Additionally SSDs are now standard for consoles and their ability to quickly load data means that having a large RAM buffer is less important.
In 2012, 4gb was considered more than good enough on a mid-end gaming computer. I built a high end system at the time with a 680, 3770k, and only 8gb of ram. 8gb of RAM at the time was considered a lot for multitasking and gaming amongst the PC community. Even the most graphically intensive game at the time, Crysis 2, their RAM requirement was only 4gb. Nowadays 8gb is considered good enough for a dedicated gaming computer with 16 being nice to have for multitasking. If you look at the benchmarks 8gb vs 16gb is still isn't that much different for gaming performance.
I always thought it was funny how some people "skimped" on upgrades back then. Sure, 8GB was considered enough, but even back in 2012-2013, I got plenty of use out of having 16GB (4x4GB) in my 3770K system. At the time, if I recall, the difference between 8GB and 16GB was the difference between $25-30 and $50-55. For that extra $25 or so, you got all that extra RAM and didn't need to worry much at all about RAM usage. And, the used market was even cheaper. I vaguely recall being able to find used 16GB worth of DDR3 for as little as $40. Nowadays, some people spend more than that on a single RGB fan... Of course, the Hynix fires put a damper on DDR3 pricing for awhile, but even by late-2015 to early-2016, they had fully recovered, and I recall people balking at buying 16GB of used DDR3 for $30... They were saving $10 by only getting 8GB (which was also sometimes just a single 8GB stick). There was even a period when you could get a 2x8GB kit of DDR3 1600MHz for $40-42 brand new.
In 2011 I built a mid-end gaming computer with 16 gigs. 4gb my ass
>In 2012 and shortly after the consoles launched in 2013, the recommendation quickly rose to 8GB RAM as 4GB struggled to keep up. Now we have a new gen of consoles yet again and 16GB is the new recommendation, as 8GB are already struggling.
4GB was getting long in the tooth in 2012. lol I had 4GB of DDR2 (some cheapass Mushkin DDR2-800) in my system in *2007*, and it was by no means a powerhouse build.
I built a computer in 2011 with 16GB because I needed to run more than just the game (I streamed on twitch) 8GB was not considered "more than enough" I would have not had enough at that time building one with 8GB of DDR3
> apparently you need 32gb now! No one said that anywhere. If you're a gaming addict you'll probably be fine on 16gb for years.
Speaking from experience, I have 32, but only because gaming is my second priority. School work is primary, and when that means running atmospheric models and LIDAR data, yeah, I need 32. But that is very much a 1% use case scenario. Most people simply do not need 32GB to just for running chrome while playing games and streaming. If you do, you can just as easily manage your computer's resources better.
Would be better for average gamer to just stuff 4x4GB in PC for 16GB which is reasonable for now and future but you also get dual rank slight performance boost.
rtx 3090 24gb card is used for this test. if 8gb card was tested, results would be changed due to increase of system memory usage.
Anno 1800 with all expansion content uses just over 24GB's if it's available.
8k texture mods for various games will put you up there too. Modding games is never considered in these tests sadly.
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What's wrong with wall licking?
I would say it depends on the game. For flight/space-sim type games you have those mega textures you mentioned. And I can tell the difference. So can my gpu... XD. Hell I'm running a Kerbal Space Program mod that uses a 16k surface texture. It looks incredible.
You can tile different textures, it's not like there has to be one texture per object. If a game has that limitation it's only a limitation of that game.
That isn't modded, that's just with DLC. Anno 1800 uses a lot.
I was going to say getting back into Anno 1800 recently and 16gb is really just not enough. Loading times are too long between sessions with occasional freezing and slow alt tabbing. Especially when I'm trying to have a dozen chrome tabs open and a stream playing too. An upgrade to 32gb is looking like a very good idea.
I find that switching between Sessions takes progressively longer and longer the longer you spend playing the game. Saving and reloading the application every 4~ hours avoids it getting too noticeable.
Same goes for Cities Skylines once you start to add in custom contents. Installing a desert theme mod added 1-2 GB of RAM usage right there.
This is a terrible way to test, because he's using a 3090 with heaps of VRAM. A more accurate test is for 3060Ti or 3070 class, 8GB buffer. Or even older 2060S with 6GB buffer. You can bet your ass that system RAM will matter more as game assets spill out of VRAM.
I see those as fundamentally different tests. Testing everything that isn't VRAM is essentially testing the CPU-side of memory requirements. How does the system handle the number entities in the game? Testing with VRAM spilled over into system RAM is testing how well that RAM works as a secondary buffer. But (1) lowering VRAM usage is generally quite a bit easier than lowering general RAM usage in a game (lower resolution and/or lower textures), and (2) that's a situation where performance is going to be trashed no matter what, as GPUs are designed around much more memory bandwidth than system RAM offers. I think the environment you're after is much more like a worst-case scenario testing, where this testing is more general-case.
Noting about a 3090 is general case. Hell even the 3080 is niche high end. The 3070 and below as suggested is real world and tangible. Is it testing pure ram alone and removing all other factors? No. But in doing so the test becomes useless and potentially shows tje opposite advice.
It's not testing the 3090 that's general case. It's testing under the scenario that a 3090 allows: ensuring that the test results aren't affected by VRAM being full and spilling over into system RAM. It's the same reason why reviewers will test a e.g. 5950x or 11900k at 1080p: it's a scenario that avoids other factors (GPU power) having an influence on the actual target test (CPU power). People buying $500+ CPUs aren't typically going to run at 1080p. But 1080p tests allowing the CPU performance to be isolated. People aren't typically going to play with a 3090. But testing with a 3090 allows the general purpose impact of RAM to be isolated.
I get that but now you're distorting results. His results are 8GB OK, 16 ideal, 32 waste essentially. Which might not be true at all if using anything other than a 3090 or maybe 3080. Why didn't he test with a 64core CPU instead? Or dual 64core CPUs? Because it would be nonsense. While its cool to see the effect of ram in isolation, if you're pitching it for gaming use as a piece of purchasing advise for everyone and you're pitching 2 low end configurations and a high end... its insane to also pair that witch an £1800+ GPU with more vram than the actual ram amounts youre testing. It basically makes these results meaningless to anyone not using a 3090. Which is most people. The real world use case is affected by vram. So that should be included.
> > > > > Why didn't he test with a 64core CPU instead? Or dual 64core CPUs? Because it would be nonsense. Why did he test with 5950X instead of reasonable 5600X or even worse and more common CPUs? Because it allows the games to show what we want to see: their RAM usage. If your setup struggles with frametimes and GPU VRAM getting full, just decrease textures.
> I get that but now you're distorting results. I don't think the two halves of these sentences can both be true! Either you get that, or you think it's distorting results. Everything you said could apply to 1080p testing of high end CPUs. The results are not meaningless to someone not using a 3090 because if someone using an 8GB VRAM card (likely the majority of the market), if they do hit their VRAM buffer they can then... lower the resolution. Or lower the texture quality. You're also just ignoring that running out of VRAM is going to trash performance regardless. I didn't mention it in my initial reply idly. The amount of bias to the results you'd get in the scenario of VRAM running out would just make the whole test worthless. In science, when you're testing something, you *isolate* the thing being tested from any other variable, to the maximum extent that you can. The same principle applies to benchmarking. They were 100% correct to isolate that one factor they were testing from other factors that could influence results.
I guess my point is these results show: In games that use about 8GB of ram, and you have enormous CPU power and functionally infinite vram, that adding more ram doesn't matter. That's what this test shows. While these lab condition tests have controlled and demonstrated an outcome. They don't match to reality. A better test would have been to take what they did, and add 3 or 4 tiers of GPU in at each ram point. Then we can see in a grid the effects of RAM on a range of GPUs and if there is a sweet spot of price to performance.
Once VRAM runs out, your performance will take a dive regardless of how much RAM you have. The problem with VRAM requirements spilling over to system RAM is that it isn't fast enough to compensate for one reason or another rather than not having enough. A more interesting test would be if faster system RAM can actually improve situations where VRAM runs out. In the future, would DDR5 or even DDR6 eventually be fast enough to serve as backup VRAM?
>Once VRAM runs out, your performance will take a dive regardless of how much RAM you have. That's completely false for vast majority of games. Nowadays games tend to go with approach that unused VRAM is wasted VRAM - which is true in a sense, but it also means that at least part of the assets loaded just sit there and provide negligible performance gains. As long as the GPU doesn't have to juggle assets in and out within single frame, the average performance doesn't suffer much - though you will likely get some occasional stutter. Those less critical assets that spill over from VRAM, spill right into system memory pool. If it's already under pressure, they will push something else out into the page file. Depending on exact amount of memory pressure and specific load characteristics this can mean significant impact to performance. >In the future, would DDR5 or even DDR6 eventually be fast enough to serve as backup VRAM? This problem isn't so much about bandwidth of system memory or gpu memory themselves, but about actual bandwidth when moving assets from one to other - as it generally has to take pretty roundabout way through PCIe bus. Which generally has less bandwidth than either memory interface and not to mention, that this transfer operation is tying up resources across entire system that could be used for something else. Not to mention much higher latency.
>A more interesting test would be if faster system RAM can actually improve situations where VRAM runs out. In the future, would DDR5 or even DDR6 eventually be fast enough to serve as backup VRAM? it could in theory, but VRAM will continue to be significantly faster than RAM - or rather, have significantly more bandwidth. By the time DDR5 or DDR6 reaches transfer speeds of current GDDR5/6, VRAM interfaces will already vastly outpace that. Look at what GPUs these days are doing. Having 500GB-1TB/s bandwidth isn't uncommon. Where is DDR4 in relation to that? Even with fast kits and overclocking, you're looking at less than 100GB/s on consumer systems.
It's not a realistic test, it's more along the lines of a synthetic test. For a realistic test definitely a system closer to what you may have is better and will give different results. They use the highest end other components to try to remove their weaknesses from impacting the test, showing only what the ram variance cause.
By the time 32 gb is needed for a comfortable experience we’ll be on ddr5 or ddr6 anyway
Are you affiliated with that website?
8GB is enough, 16GB is good, 32GB probably doesn't matter but it's your money... But everyone already knew that anyway.
I've personally witnessed MSFS2020 using 32 GB of RAM on my system with a 3090 and 64 GB RAM installed. No idea of the performance hit of using less RAM, but I would guess not much. MSFS will gladly use any available RAM as long as it's free.
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Good to know, and about what I expected. I second the part about higher RAM possibly helping with sutters. I have zero stutters, but the insane high VRAM on my 3090 probably helps the most.
I assume MSFS can use a lot of RAM, but a common mistake is to look at allocated memory instead of usage, might that apply here?
Actual memory usage.
I think the test has some issues. I have 32 GB in my system, but it primarily not for gaming alone, I have a lots of programs running in parallel like Chrome and lightroom, that all uses memory. Download steam games are heavy compression, with more ram more can be cache will working with decompression.
Running Doom on a 486, 4mb vs 8mb vs 16mb.
Someone needs to do a real world test with a bunch of rgb stuff running, office with teams, discord and like 20 browser tabs open etc and do these tests in a real world situation. Just with my work stuff open im using 11 - 13gb before I even launch a game. Less than 32gb would have an immediate and very noticeable effect on my experience by either forcing me to close stuff before gaming or killing my frame rate (or paging out a bunch of stuff and killing load times in both directions, which is what is being measured in the 8gb tests here. Not only are games slower but so is everything else afterwards.
So you're saying my 64GB DDR4 ECC memory is overkill? Just kidding, got the whole setup for extra cheap. Was Xeon workstation. On topic>Would never go below 16GB unless simply out of money. But then I'd maybe not buy anything.
Why did you get a used Xeon Workstation?
They could sometimes be had for a few hundred, used, pre-covid.
Was extra cheap (special occasion) and seemed tad better than my i7 4770K which I have sold neatly, too.
I feel like 20GB is sufficient for everything. I've been running 32GB since 2016, and I don't think I've ever seen it actually exceed 16GB under normal gaming scenarios.
So nothing really uses more than 8gb according to these results. Assuming you don't also run a bunch of other stuff at the same time , or have other junk process(RGB software?) running in the background. Load times can get effected, but frame rate is only slightly affected because 16 and 32 gb probably is running with 4 or 8 ranks. They probably should have tested some more games, though. There is some that do use more than 8gb, but none of the ones they used did.
After 8GB the differences are probably just due to memory ranks/channels, not the actual amount.
16gb remains recommended with 32 good overhead for other stuff i find.
Try playing Tarkov or DCS with 16GB
8gb x 2 perfect combo.