Do games need 16gb of memory yet?

LordBritish

LordBritish

2[H]4U
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It's been a while since I placed a PC game.

Last one was Deux Ex Mankind Divided and Hitman (2016).

Neither of these game are ancient yet and they played just fine with only 8gb of system memory.

Do I need 16gb now?
 
I have 16GB but no games I know of need that much. Most gamers install 16GB or more now though.
 
I have 16GB. No you don't need 16GB for games. I haven't seen any games really fill up more that 6GB or so other than some odd cases like Planetary Annihilation.

What is nice about having more than 8GB is that when you quit the game and go back to doing other things with your computer you'll find that everything didn't get paged out to play the game. Probably not as big of a deal with SSDs but it is nice to play something for a break and then get back to work without slowdown.
 
I've had 16GB in my machine since 2012. The games themselves haven't really needed that much until recently, but there has always been other overhead like the OS, video card drivers, and possibly other software (recording/streaming). Most times when I'm playing a game my machine is using over 12GB. Whether that 12GB is devoted entirely to a game, or it's spread across everything else, I don't care. It means I'm using a majority of the RAM I paid for and I don't have to make any sacrifices to the way I do things.
 
No you don't
Most new games don't use over 6gb RAM at the most.
 
There's a difference between a game using xGB of RAM and it needing xGB.
 
Not really. 8GB (dual / quad channel) or 12GB (tri channel) is sufficient.
12GB / 16GB to be comfortable.
 
The question should be do you need more than 8GB for the way you game on your PC?
You could get 12GB of ram and still run dual channel but its far more likely you would have 8 or 16GB.
So if not 8GB then 16GB.

If you dont mind closing down everything before you game, nearly all should run well with 8GB.
But if you fancy gaming while in the middle of something you may need more.
 
If I was building a gaming rig right now, even a budget one, I wouldn't go with less than 32GB. RAM is too cheap now to not get as much as you can, and many applications (not just games) are not optimized to be memory efficient, hogging more memory than they should. I built my current gaming rig more than a year ago and went with 64GB memory without hesitation.
 
If you currently have >=8G, no, I wouldn't bother upgrading until you find a case that requires it. <8G, you may need to think about upgrading sooner than later, depending on what you are playing - I've seen some cases where that starts to swap a good deal.

If you are building a new rig, then yeah, may as well do at least 16 because... because.
 
Maybe in some kind of edge case but in general no. I mean there are some strategy games that let you generate crazy huge maps and maybe you can make them use a ton of RAM, but nothing I've seen comes close. Most games, even 64-bit ones, use less than 4GB for themselves and anything 32-bit is normally going to max out at 2GB (and cannot use more than 4GB no matter what).

The only real reason to get 16GB is as insurance/future proofing. What I mean by insurance is that your OS and background processes need some RAM too. So if a game itself needed nearly all of 8GB, it would cause paging, slowing shit down. In the future, we may see games start to take more RAM as they get more complex graphics, particularly in light of the new gen of consoles having like 12GB of RAM.

If you were to build a new system, I'd say 16GB for sure as it isn't expensive and you should be good with that for quite some time. If you have an 8GB system now and it is happy then don't worry.
 
16GB gives you some nice overhead and RAM is cheap enough that I basically recommend it myself.

8GB at minimum absolutely.
 
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