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8GB --> 16GB - Is it worth it?

S

s1njin

Senior member
Hey Gang,

Amazon has my memory sticks on sale today for almost 100 bucks less than I paid for my first pair of 4GB sticks in March. Amazing.

Is there any gaming benefit (tangible) to going to 16 GB from 8?

Win7 x64 obviously. Rig posted in sig.

Thanks much.


Moved from PC Gaming

Anandtech Moderator
KeithTalent
 
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Game developers target 6+ year old 32-bit hardware that has < 4GB of system and video memory combined. The answer to your question is "no."
 
Are you close to maxing it when you are playing your games?

I went from 4 to 16 on my computer and it made a big difference, but I was always within 15&#37; of maxing it when I was playing at 4. Now my 64bit OS can use a lot of memory for itself (even before I open a game it's using almost 2 gigs), and I can still play games that require a couple more gigs.

I still use less than 8 though, unless I'm working with an adobe product.
 
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8 is a good place to be in my opinion. Next time I build a computer in a year or so it'll probably be 16, but I wouldn't go out of my way now to get it. I personally think a little excessive is just enough when it comes to ram.
 
4 is fine for all basic to intermediate computer tasks including a lot of gaming.
8 is good if you have tons of programs open and want to still have the most intensive games playable without maxing out the rest of available RAM. You can also get a fair bit of work related tasks (ie, video editing) done with 8GB of RAM.

I would say 16GB is good if you'll make use of it. For example, in addition to the above you'll have some room to use ramdisks, you need space for virtual PC or other things like that. This setup will be a lot more optimal for work tasks rather than games, as with 8GB you might still be tight depending on the type of work you do.

Having said that, my system still has only 4GB and I never run out of that even, so I'll have to agree with everyone else about 8 being the sweet spot right now.
 
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I've been able to utilize 12GB of my 24GB. But haven't been able to push far beyond that point. So I should have bought the 16GB instead of 24GB, and with memory at its current prices, it is practically a no brainer.
 
What software are you using? If you are doing post processing of images in Lightroom or Photoshop, I'd say yeah. If all you do is web surf and write the occasional document, save your money or put it into some other component you know you will get good use of.
 
I had tried it out, but i really had a hard time getting my RAM usage above eight in practical situations. Finally jumped up to nine after running 6+ Adobe Applications, Visual Studio, and Virtualizing Win Server 2003
 
I went from 4 GB to 8 GB, and I can't see going any higher for just gaming. My system would frequently go over 4 GB of RAM used especially when playing SC2 unless I rebooted and opened nothing but SC2.

I'm also able to turn down the paging file to the minimum, which likely improves performance.
 
This thread started off in the gaming forum, and the focus of my machine is purely running games. Thanks much for the answers.
 
My 12/24GB utilization was from a gaming perspective. The other heavy hitter was mainly firefox. However, several of the scenarios where high memory utilization was required were multi-boxing scenarios. All the same, 16GB is dirt cheap.
 
I'd say 6-8gb is the sweet spot for a gaming rig. You'll be upgrading the whole thing before you start using 16gb.
 
Most folks here seem to be looking for gaming performance.

I just built a new rig and upgraded to 8 Gb. I logged my memory utilization with BF3 maxed out. It ran between 40 and 50&#37; utilization for the whole session.

Unless you plan on doing some serious multitasking or running memory intensive applications, the answer is no.
 
my simpleton approach is this - if you can afford it, do it!! what is it going to hurt if you have 16gb of memory in your system? nothing!! it is all good :biggrin::awe:
 
Almost all games are still 32-bit. By default a 32-bit game cannot access more than 2GB of RAM. If a 32-bit game is Large Address Aware (most are not) then under a best-case scenario it would be able to access up to 4GB of RAM. A 32-bit program (read: all current games) will never be able to use more than 4GB of RAM under any circumstances.

So going from having double what any game could ever use to quadruple what any game could ever use is going to give you exactly the results you would expect.
 
For gaming - I can't imagine it would make a difference.

Look up the ram usage while yo play games. Best bet is that you'll find that you're far form saturating 8 GB.
 
Just checked out ram usage in a handful of games. The biggest ram user I could find was The Witcher 2 @ 1.3 Gb.

I don't own BF3, so it's not one of the ones I tested.
 
s1njin said:
Hey Gang,

Amazon has my memory sticks on sale today for almost 100 bucks less than I paid for my first pair of 4GB sticks in March. Amazing.

Is there any gaming benefit (tangible) to going to 16 GB from 8?

Win7 x64 obviously. Rig posted in sig.

Thanks much.


Moved from PC Gaming

Anandtech Moderator
KeithTalent
Click to expand...

I have seen tangible benefits in loading times using 12GB vs 4 GB when I also used fancycache and enabled a 6GB read cache with deferred writes. This also risks data corruption if there is a power failure during the time that writes are deferred.

I recently installed a 120GB Intel 320 SSD and kept parallel windows installations for a while, and the difference between the 2nd level load on the spindle drive and a load on the SSD is minimal. There is, however a gigantic difference on the first load due to the need for the caching to happen when you are relying on fancycache to provide loading speed benefits.

Outside of these caching differences, there is no advantage to 8GB in games, let alone 16GB. Most games are not even LAA, let alone 64 bit. It's kind of a big deal that Skyrim released a LAA executable today, as it's now among the few games that can utilize more than 2GB (BF3 is another that can, don't know of any others).

LAA means Large Address Aware. This refers to the addressable memory space. Without LAA enabled, a game will only be able to address 2GB total memory. This is a combined total of system AND video memory for textures and such. It's VERY common to see games using about 1.1-1.4 GB. The remainder of the 2GB of addressable space is being used for video memory for textures and such.

Those that are LAA can address up to 4GB of memory, again, a combined total of system and video memory, and like I said the list of LAA games is short, very short.

Until you start seeing 64 bit REQUIRED games, 4GB is the absolute maximum amount of memory a video game will use. 32 bit executables simply cannot address any more memory than that. As a result, 8GB is enough for the immediate future, at least the next few years, as Steam surveys demonstrate that there is still a large portion of the market using 32 bit OSes. If the next gen consoles are 64 bit, you may start to see a more significant shift, though considering current gen consoles have 512 MB TOTAL memory (PS3 has 256 system and 256 video while the xBox has 512 that is shared and can be either system or video mem) They may stick to 4GB or less memory even on the next gen consoles.

16 GB will not offer any direct gaming benefits, it's actually completely impossible unless you know you are dealing with a 64 bit game. Benefits are only indirect, either via caching as I noted, or via offering usable memory for browsers and other applications in the background while you are gaming.
 
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