16GB still overkill for modern games?

[PrincessFrosty]

Here's a graph I developed in Excel using PC games (2-3 PC games a year, mostly PC exclusives but some console ports, from 2003 to 2013). Many points overlap, so it looks like far fewer:

RAM requirements increased by 2^3 or 2^4 since 2003. However, the rate has stagnated since 2010, floating at 4GB or so, likely because of "legacy" support for 32-bit OSes. Even before then, you can see that the games take longer and longer between each doubling (a year at 256MB, three years at 512MB, 3 years at 2GB, 4 years at 4GB). Until a majority of computers and consoles can utilize more than 8GB (in the case of consoles, between the VRAM and the RAM), I don't think we'll see more than 4GB. Even the new consoles probably won't push past 5 or 6GB of RAM, since much of that needs to go to the GPU (shared space for RAM in consoles).

Thanks for doing that graph.

I think you're right, we've see a steady increase in the amount of RAM we can afford to put in our PCs as the modules increase in size and become affordable, but we hit the 32bit "wall" and stagnated, I think in the case of games that's partially also because of the long console lifecycles and their fixed hardware.

Once the consoles are launched and have 8Gb RAM sizes (I kind of wish this was 16Gb) then hopefully we should see the usage skyrocket, we have these huge games these days up to 30Gb in size and still a measly 2Gb of RAM usage. With spare CPU cores streaming media off the disk and into RAM while playing should be possible and then when it comes to loading art assets into video memory going straight from RAM to vRAM should make loading very fast.

The whole unified memory of Volta in 2014 is an exciting prospect for gaming, sharing vRAM and RAM should have been done a LONG time ago.

 

[pandemonium]

Build for the future, not the present. 8GB may be perfectly sufficient today for gaming and doing various gaming related tasks simultaneously, but in 2-4 years, will you really want to have to buy another set of DIMMs for a platform that you may want to upgrade anyways? And, older DIMMs are usually more expensive when looking after they've been reduced to legacy status due to lacking supply.

The only legitimate reason [in the past] not to buy more than needed, is if you're going for an overclocking competition and needed as few DIMMs as possible to allow for a more stable overclock and higher frequencies.

This is absolutely not necessary with the latest generation of chipsets since the memory controller was integrated onto the CPU from the north bridge.

In short: buy more RAM and be happy you'll never run into a bottleneck there.

 

[Stringjam]

Build for the future, not the present.
In short: buy more RAM and be happy you'll never run into a bottleneck there.

But that's kind of what I was getting at earlier.....what's the point? If you already have over 8 GB of RAM, why spend a bunch now, when BY THIS TIME NEXT YEAR we will likely have new MB's and a much faster DDR4 available.

From what I understand 32GB DDR4 sets will likely be a common size.

I guess for those wanting to keep their current machines going for several more years, than getting more RAM would make sense, but I don't get the current "freak-out" over DDR3, since the prices will likely drop significantly along the way.

 

[aaksheytalwar]

DDR4 will be introduced for consumers (probably for Haswell E) in 2014. By the time mainstream users can buy it will be 2015 or sorts with either the successor or Haswell or the successor of successor of Haswell.

Most enthusiasts (at least those who build rigs below 2k) will not be able to buy DDR4 RAM at least till sometime in 2015 if not later even if it is introduced in Haswell E in 2014, servers that is.

For it to become mainstream it will be a minimum of 2015/2016 when DDR3 starts to phase out slowly. For DDR4 to reach prices of DDR3 today it will easily be 2016-2018.

During the initial 2016 phase, 32GB DDR4 will easily set you back $400-600 or more I guess.

 

[homercles337]

Looking at prices, I paid $164 for 4x8GB. Looking at the same RAM now, 3 months later, it's at $208.

I spent $109 on Mushkin Redline 3X4GB a few weeks back...

 

[FalseChristian]

Well, if you want more than 16GB don't use Windows 7 Home Premium. This piece of shit OS only supports 16GB! If I woulda known that I would have gotten Windows 7 Ultimate!

 

[Munky]

16GB is overkill, and chances are the rest of your current hardware will be "underkill" before the magical 16GB and 32GB you invested in will be useful for games.

 

[BrightCandle]

16GB helps all of today's games a bit by providing more disk caching which should speed up loads a little. But I know of no games that benefit from it beyond that. Arms does utilise it in the sense it will load assets into spare ram, but it doesn't need more than 4GB. 8GB is potentially useful, considering the os uses 1GB or more having a full 4GB available for a game is potentially good, but most dont use much more than 1GB.

Today 16GB is no use for games. Obviously in the future it will be, but like others I suspect by the time it is utilised we will have long moved on. Today's machines should have 8GB as standard, its more than enough as a gamer but not too tight for the near future games that will likely use more than 4GB.

 

[AdamK47]

I don't think it's overkill.

 

[smackababy]

I think Munky has made the best point so far. By the time you will need 32gb or even 16gb of ram to run games smoothly, you will have had to update pretty much everything else, so unless you just like to have lots of ram, there isn't a reason to go more than 16gb if all you do is game.

 

[Sleepingforest]

I don't think it's overkill.

It's not overkill in the sense that more will hurt. But 16GB is more than any game alone will require right now--they simply don't have that much to store. RAM is unlike other components in that once you have enough, extra won't help or make things better.

 

[TheSlamma]

Slightly off topic question, is it required to adjust the page file settings in Windows7 (like we did in XP) or does it handle this on it's own?

(i.e. if you have a ton of memory to spare, does it automatically prioritize the memory over the pagefile, or do you have to disable the pagefile to force it?).

Win7 x64 handles memory much better. with 16GB+ you won't see your page file used much, I fire up BF3 and have other stuff running at the same time, resource manager has it at little to zero use.

 

[BFG10K]

This piece of shit OS only supports 16GB! If I woulda known that I would have gotten Windows 7 Ultimate!

You can upgrade from My Computer's properties. Also you only need the Pro version to support >16 GB.

 

[BladeVenom]

You can upgrade from My Computer's properties. Also you only need the Pro version to support >16 GB.

Which is more expensive than 16GB of memory.

There's also Linux, no added in memory restrictions. Now that Steam is coming out with Steam Linux, it's going to be a worthwhile choice for gaming.

 

[thm1223]

16GB helps all of today's games a bit by providing more disk caching which should speed up loads a little. But I know of no games that benefit from it beyond that. Arms does utilise it in the sense it will load assets into spare ram, but it doesn't need more than 4GB. 8GB is potentially useful, considering the os uses 1GB or more having a full 4GB available for a game is potentially good, but most dont use much more than 1GB.

Today 16GB is no use for games. Obviously in the future it will be, but like others I suspect by the time it is utilised we will have long moved on. Today's machines should have 8GB as standard, its more than enough as a gamer but not too tight for the near future games that will likely use more than 4GB.

Is there a quantitative study on just how much faster extra RAM can increase load times, particularly if you already have an SSD?

 

[BrightCandle]

Is there a quantitative study on just how much faster extra RAM can increase load times, particularly if you already have an SSD?

Not that I know of. In order to test its impact you need test a hot and a cold load of a level and see if it makes any real difference. Some games its going to, Shogun Total War 2 for example benefits massively from an SSD and hence additional RAM would aid it. its a test likely better done with a hard drive than an SSD if you want to see it have an impact, as the difference between SSD and RAM might be hard to measure.

Like I say I don't anticipate 16GB being much use yet, and the benefits of hard drive caching are questionable considering how you might have to go about testing it so I think its far to say the benefits of that amount of RAM is pretty small right now.

 

[dagamer34]

I'm not sure abundant amounts of RAM really matter as much as they did pre-2009 when any time you went to the hard drive to grab data, it was SLOOOOWWW. Now with SSDs and random read speeds in the hundreds of MB/sec, needing more than 8GB (at least today) isn't necessary.

I've got 16GB of RAM in my computer and have never seen it use more than 5GB, and that's with Windows caching data. Maybe if I were also running a bunch of VMs while gaming, but that's a different story.

 

[Fox5]

I have 32GB of ram. With a bunch of Google chrome windows open, I have about 7GB used. About 1GB is used up by facebook, 1/2GB used up by the rest of my tabs, 1/2GB for gmail, and the various background plugins make up about another 1/2GB. I'm not really sure where the 7GB of use comes in, windows says only about 1/2GB is cache files, 38MB is hardware reserved, so I'm not sure what's making use of so much ram...

But either way, I still have more than enough ram to fire up a game and a virtual machine and still have memory left over. It's nice to never have to close anything or worry about the computer slowing down.

 

[StinkyPinky]

Build for the future, not the present. 8GB may be perfectly sufficient today for gaming and doing various gaming related tasks simultaneously, but in 2-4 years, will you really want to have to buy another set of DIMMs for a platform that you may want to upgrade anyways? And, older DIMMs are usually more expensive when looking after they've been reduced to legacy status due to lacking supply.

The only legitimate reason [in the past] not to buy more than needed, is if you're going for an overclocking competition and needed as few DIMMs as possible to allow for a more stable overclock and higher frequencies.

This is absolutely not necessary with the latest generation of chipsets since the memory controller was integrated onto the CPU from the north bridge.

In short: buy more RAM and be happy you'll never run into a bottleneck there.

I disagree. Sure, maybe plan a bit for the future but don't go overboard. 16gb is pointless for a gaming PC. Totally pointless.

Why waste money when by the time 16GB helps the rest of your PC will be obsolete anyway?

 

[BFG10K]

Which is more expensive than 16GB of memory.

By the time 16GB memory becomes a size bottleneck (5+ years from now, at least), Windows 7 will be a dinosaur

There's also Linux, no added in memory restrictions. Now that Steam is coming out with Steam Linux, it's going to be a worthwhile choice for gaming.

Riiiight. You do know those 1000s of Steam games don't actually run on Linux, right? They're Windows binaries, so they need to be ported. So far we've got a couple of native titles from Valve, but that's about it. Not even a drop in the bucket.

 

[BFG10K]

I have 32GB of ram. With a bunch of Google chrome windows open, I have about 7GB used.

That's absolutely abnormal. You're either reading your memory usage wrong or you have some kind of virus/malware.

With several IE tabs open and multiple desktop apps like Word and Access, my entire system is barely using 1.6GB right now. I also perform the same workload on a work machine with just 2GB RAM without issue.

I have 16GB as well, but I know it's completely overkill. There are some niche cases where a lot of RAM is useful, but 99% of the time it's just e-peen.

 

[alcoholbob]

That's absolutely abnormal. You're either reading your memory usage wrong or you have some kind of virus/malware.

With several IE tabs open and multiple desktop apps like Word and Access, my entire system is barely using 1.6GB right now. I also perform the same workload on a work machine with just 2GB RAM without issue.

I have 16GB as well, but I know it's completely overkill. There are some niche cases where a lot of RAM is useful, but 99% of the time it's just e-peen.

There must be a pretty big memory leak with his system, I agree. I have Steam, Origin, AIM, some overclocking software, Foobar, plus 12 tabs on Firefox and I'm running on 1.91GB of RAM used, with 16GB total in the system. I don't know how it's remotely possible to idle at 7GB used by Windows.

 

[Bateluer]

There must be a pretty big memory leak with his system, I agree. I have Steam, Origin, AIM, some overclocking software, Foobar, plus 12 tabs on Firefox and I'm running on 1.91GB of RAM used, with 16GB total in the system. I don't know how it's remotely possible to idle at 7GB used by Windows.

He's using IE.


With 37 Chrome tabs, uTurrent, FRAPs, Steam, Origin, Virtu, some ASRock utilities, I'm usually sitting between 5-6GBs of RAM usage on a 16GB system.


Also, Steam Linux has a lot more than just a few Valve titles, there's a ton of indie titles. Granted, thats not much. Still, Steam Linux overtook Steam Mac in about 3 months.

 

[Rinaun]

He's using IE.


With 37 Chrome tabs, uTurrent, FRAPs, Steam, Origin, Virtu, some ASRock utilities, I'm usually sitting between 5-6GBs of RAM usage on a 16GB system.


Also, Steam Linux has a lot more than just a few Valve titles, there's a ton of indie titles. Granted, thats not much. Still, Steam Linux overtook Steam Mac in about 3 months.

I cannot wait to move my OS over to linux. I really enjoy linux (Mint distro), but switching back and forth between PCs/screens/OSes is just too tedious with my current setup. Once steam linux takes off a bit more I'll switch everything over and keep a small partition in case I need W7/8.

I have War Thunder/RDP/origin/steam plus a few other minuscule apps open, pushing my RAM usage to 3.35GB/16GB. I could see using up 8GB, but to use 16gb would require you to do an insanely silly amount of multitasking while gaming.

 

[Bateluer]

That's absolutely abnormal. You're either reading your memory usage wrong or you have some kind of virus/malware.

With several IE tabs open and multiple desktop apps like Word and Access, my entire system is barely using 1.6GB right now. I also perform the same workload on a work machine with just 2GB RAM without issue.

I have 16GB as well, but I know it's completely overkill. There are some niche cases where a lot of RAM is useful, but 99% of the time it's just e-peen.

I wanted to comment more on this now since I've more time to actually write than I did previously.

Fox5's RAM usage is in-line with what I see on my system, though I've only got 16GBs. Its normal, not a memory leak. BFG looks like he has an extremely light load.

Our work machines have 4GBs installed, and we routinely max that out and things get sluggish. Some of it is undeniably security software installed, but the rest is just gobbled up in web based applications we use. Also, OneNote sucks RAM like a Wino in Italy.