4GB enough for gaming, according to Tech Spot

[Carfax83]

This really surprised me.

In fact, I find it almost unbelievable. Not only did they test some notable memory hogging games like GTA V and Batman Arkham Knight, but they also tested these aforementioned games with 65 chrome tabs running in the background.

And there was hardly any frame rate difference. Now granted RAM doesn't really impact average frame rate, that part at least is not surprising. And the reviewer never tested for things like frame latency or minimum frame rate, which RAM can definitely affect.

But I would think he would have mentioned discrepancies if there were any.

In PCgameshardware's preview of Star Wars Battlefront open beta, they tested for a difference between 8GB and 16GB RAM configuration, and they found a significant difference to be sure.

Personally, I think 8GB is the minimum amount of RAM for gaming these days. 16GB is what I recommend for high end gaming if the user prefers to disable the pagefile, which allows for a smoother and more consistent gaming experience.

32GB is overkill, but RAM is so cheap that if you see a good sale, I say go for it.. The only game I can see in the near future that could potentially benefit from 32GB of RAM is Star Citizen, given it's size, scope, seamless nature and persistent world.

 

[BFG10K]

8GB is so cheap that there's no reason not to have it as a minimum. Even 16GB is really pushing mainstream pricing these days.

 

[BSim500]

Personally, I think 8GB is the minimum amount of RAM for gaming these days. 16GB is what I recommend for high end gaming if the user prefers to disable the pagefile, which allows for a smoother and more consistent gaming experience.

I agree 8GB is really a minimum. One thing that more memory does impact (that they didn't specifically test for) is the effect of file caching of level data, ie, even if a game is 32-bit and uses no more than 2GB RAM at any one time, all the files that it opens will be cached into memory by Windows. Depending on how that game is structured, it could have a greater / lesser impact according to storage. Eg, a 20GB game arranged into 40,000 small files (eg, SOMA) will "strain" a mechanical HDD far more than another similar sized 20GB game arranged into 25 "packed" large files (eg, Deus Ex: Human Revolution). I've just tested this myself with SOMA taking almost 57s to load "cold" from a 5,400rpm HDD, only 16s "cold" from an SSD but only 14s "warm" (already cached in memory) even from a 5,400rpm HDD. OTOH, a game like DXHR with few big files the difference is much less like 10s vs 7s.

So if you're using an SSD only to boot and use a HDD for the bulk of games (which they didn't test for, they tested only on an MX200 1TB which is the same as my drive which is very fast for games), then the difference with having more memory to cache stuff is massive particularly on games structured into "many small files" on a spinner, if the game reuses the same resources / returns to same areas / levels on just 4GB RAM.

 

[Carfax83]

8GB is so cheap that there's no reason not to have it as a minimum. Even 16GB is really pushing mainstream pricing these days.

Yeah I agree. That's why I went with a 32GB kit, even though I don't necessarily need that much RAM. It was on sale for a good price, so I though, why the heck not?

I agree 8GB is really a minimum. One thing that more memory does impact (that they didn't specifically test for) is the effect of file caching of level data

Good point BSim500. I've noticed this myself already. Before on my previous X79 build with 16GB of DDR3 2133, total system memory usage would be anywhere from 7.8 to 8.2GB when playing Batman Arkham Knight. Now on my X99 build, I've seen it use as much as 11GB. This is with the pagefile disabled on both machines..

Witcher 3 on the other hand uses only about 400 to 500MB more than it did when I was running it on the X79 machine, which kind of surprised me as I thought it would use more..

So yeah, some games and game engines really take advantage of caching data in RAM, while others not so much.. I can definitely say that Windows 10 has an excellent caching algorithm. So far I've seen it cache up to 26GB of data..