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Gaming PC: Any real need to have more than 8 gigs

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Pwndenburg

Member
Basically, as posted above. I run a desktop that is only used for gaming and spreadsheets. Is there any reason at all to run greater than 8 gigs of ram?
 
You are fine with 8GB. You are in the sweet spot and there are no games out there right now that benefit from much more than that. That might not be true a year or two from not, but it stands true today. 16 GB is technically better than 8 GB, but there are diminishing returns to consider. See the link below for information.

http://www.techbuyersguru.com/RAMgaming.php
 
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Anteaus said:
You are fine with 8GB. You are in the sweet spot and there are no games out there right now that benefit from much more than that. That might not be true a year or two from not, but it stands true today. 16 GB is technically better than 8 GB, but there are diminishing returns to consider. See the link below for information.

http://www.techbuyersguru.com/RAMgaming.php
Click to expand...

It looks like 4GB is more than enough as well:

4gbVS8GBgamingbench.PNG


Wow! This is definitely not what we expected to see! Out of our six benchmarks, only two show a difference greater than 1 percent, and in one case, Battlefield 3 Multi-Player, it was 3 percent slower with 8GB! That is likely just a result of test-to-test variability due to real-world online gaming. That leaves Tomb Raider as the lone game that may arguably benefit from more than 4GB of RAM, with a 3 percent increase in frames per second, from 43.0fps to 44.5fps. There's also a slight benefit to the minimum framerate in the majority of our games, although it likely would not be noticed while gaming.

So what's going on here? Well, our theory is that because games are still coded as 32-bit applications, which cannot take advantage of more than 4GB, it's simply impossible for them to benefit from additional memory unless the system itself has a number of other applications running. And for our tests, we of course had nothing extraneous running in the background.
Click to expand...
 
In my steam catalog out of 50+ items, 0 are 64-bit apps. 0 can use more than 2GB, so yeah, with OS and game loaded, and nothing much loaded in background, you won't notice difference between 4GB and 8GB.
 
postmortemIA said:
In my steam catalog out of 50+ items, 0 are 64-bit apps. 0 can use more than 2GB, so yeah, with OS and game loaded, and nothing much loaded in background, you won't notice difference between 4GB and 8GB.
Click to expand...
32 bit games can use 4GB on 64 bit Windows if they have LAA enabled, and I'd expect the vast majority of AAA games released in the last three years do so.
 
cbn said:
It looks like 4GB is more than enough as well:

4gbVS8GBgamingbench.PNG
Click to expand...

As the article states, this is without anything else running in the background.

If I check task manager, I have various things using some RAM, and if you want to leave a browser open, that's quite a chunk of RAM. Going with only 4GB now is OK in the short term, but will soon start to be insufficient. If you've only got 2 RAM slots, then 4GB is stupid but if you have 4 slots and are tight for money, 4GB is "OK" for now, and you can always upgrade later.
 
I have 4 GIGS of DDR2 and I can pretty much run anything.

There was a time I tested to see if it would work and I ended up playing over 30 copes of my favorite game smoothly.

Don't let the amount matter much because most of it becomes idle anyways.
 
Sattern said:
I have 4 GIGS of DDR2 and I can pretty much run anything.

There was a time I tested to see if it would work and I ended up playing over 30 copes of my favorite game smoothly.

Don't let the amount matter much because most of it becomes idle anyways.
Click to expand...

How long ago was that, and what game?
 
Oh yea BTW, this is 4GB to 8GB. Get RAM to match your rig.. I bet you 8GB to 16GB is even lower FPS etc...
 
32gb of ram here. I have never seen my comp use more than 6gb when gaming. i've played most all the AAA titles.
But. I have a 24gb ram disk that I load the game I am currently playing onto. Really speeds up the level loads and such.
 
Squeetard said:
32gb of ram here. I have never seen my comp use more than 6gb when gaming. i've played most all the AAA titles.
But. I have a 24gb ram disk that I load the game I am currently playing onto. Really speeds up the level loads and such.
Click to expand...

Also have 32GB here just because I can. I might try the ramdisk suggestion.
 
cbn said:
It looks like 4GB is more than enough as well:

4gbVS8GBgamingbench.PNG
Click to expand...
I know this is a personal anecdote, but I was forced to upgrade from 4 GB to 8 GB of RAM for Battlefield 3 multiplayer after my ram kept maxing out during play on the highest graphics settings. My RAM would max out and my page file would start being worked like crazy, and the game would stutter like crazy. I ran a benchmark utility to confirm that this was indeed happening (it was). Upgrading to 8 GB fixed the problem completely. Part of this might have had to do with having only 1 GB of VRAM (barebones AMD 5870).

In my experience 8 GB of RAM is plenty for most gaming uses. Unless you intend to run other RAM intensive programs in the background during your games, such as Minecraft with a large texture pack or a Virtual Machine you shouldn't have any issues. I definitely recommend 2 x 4 GB RAM sticks.
 
8 is more than enough I'm sure, I just use 12 because it's older tri channel I guess and 6 seems a bit low perhaps.

There are other ways to do it on the board, but it was designed for that so I just stay there.
 
Thanks for all the helpful replies. I was thinking of jumping up and going the ramdisk route. It seems a bit advanced for me. Barring that, it seems I'm at the sweet spot with 8 gig gskill 1600 9-9-9-24.
 
watch_dogs is a memory leak on steroids.

my computer kept crashing and widows popped up with out of memory errors every time i played it.

i had 8gb now 16
 
Yea, I feel your pain. I'm glad I avoided that game like the plague. I cannot hardly base hardware decisions on an abortion like that game though 😛
 
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