How long do you estimate games will need more than 16GB RAM?

[jsmith0000]

Currently its minimum 6 GB and recommended 8GB

How long do you think we will reach the age of minimum 8GB and recommended 16GB?

What does main ram do for games exactly? isn't it that modern games now need plenty VRAM as opposed to main ram? has the RAM shifted to VRAM? if so How?

 

[VirtualLarry]

Currently its minimum 6 GB and recommended 8GB

How long do you think we will reach the age of minimum 8GB and recommended 16GB?

What does main ram do for games exactly? isn't it that modern games now need plenty VRAM as opposed to main ram? has the RAM shifted to VRAM? if so How?

Honestly? When consoles start coming with 16GB total RAM. It could happen in 3-5 years. It's possible.

 

[frozentundra123456]

Depends on the game. A few of the most demanding titles are pushing the 8gb level now I think, but for most 8 is plenty. I think 16gb should be more than enough for the current console generation at least. The time estimate of Virtual Larry seems pretty reasonable, although I would tend to think it will be more toward the 5 years than 3. Actually, mini-rant here, but I feel the system requirements for current AAA games are really excessive for the amount of improvements we are seeing in graphics and gameplay. Everybody thought the x86 consoles would usher in this great golden age of PC gaming, but in actuality we are still stuck as second class citizen getting mostly sloppy ports with a minimal amount of optimization for PC.

But "it is what it is" as they say. Personally, I was able to barely play Witcher 3 on my system, but refuse to upgrade just because there are not any games coming out that I feel are worth the price of upgrading the gpu. There are plenty of older easy to run games in my Steam catalog, I will just go back to those.

 

[Burpo]

Wrong section as usual..
Before the next coming ban?

 

[VirtualLarry]

Wrong section as usual..
Before the next coming ban?

Kids these days...

 

[MongGrel]

Wrong section as usual..
Before the next coming ban?

I actually saw this earlier and didn't comment.

But ya...

 

[Blitzvogel]

8 GB system memory + 2 GB VRAM minimum or go home.

Optimally, 16 GB system RAM and 6/8 GB VRAM will carry you through this generation. 4 GB of VRAM would be fine if it wasn't for the issue that the PS4 and Xbone have the majority of their 8 GB available to game programmers and that has been reflected in multiplatform games. For the time being 4 GB should be good enough, but in a couple years, I think PC gamers might be wishing they had more as the textures, effects, and shaders start to really saturate video memory. The same issue occurred with the PC versus the PS3 and 360, but the difference is that the PS4 and Xbone have much more memory heavy OSs and background tasks. 512 MB VRAM could in essence get you by last gen, but towards the end of the cycle, 1080p PC gamers needed 1 GB VRAM to be able to really enjoy PC versions of games at their max settings. It helped that developers started to provide their PC versions with exclusive features once again too.

 

[TeknoBug]

We've been around the 8GB point for about 5 years, games still aren't fully using 8GB yet but runs like shit on 4GB systems and most of us has upgraded to 12/16GB already. VRAM is a different story, you're not going to get by with 1GB cards anymore unless you turn settings all the way down, textures are getting more detailed and larger in size- luckily I was able to play Planetside 2 with a HD5770 while my R9 280X card was being RMA'd.

 

[WhoBeDaPlaya]

If the game is a 32-bit exec, it's limited to < 4GB anyway...

 

[MajinCry]

If you have a RAMDisk, and don't mind using junctions and/or symbolic links, games can "use" that much RAM with ease.

 

[h4rm0ny]

Honestly? When consoles start coming with 16GB total RAM. It could happen in 3-5 years. It's possible.

Possible but unlikely. You don't even need 4GB today and could do 4K gaming with 8GB reasonably well. So unless the next generation of consoles have enough processing grunt to do 4K resolutions (doubtful to me), there's little reason to outfit them with the amount of memory you would need to do that.

That said, it's going to be hard to sell people new consoles to replace their old ones without a very significant plus to the new ones, so 4K would be one way to do that. Five years for 4K consoles? It is possible...

 

[ShintaiDK]

Memory limit/usage doesnt depend on consoles.

We are starting to see games with 6 and 8GB. However I think it will quickly get inflated as the move to 64bit continues.

More than 16GB is far away for now tho.

 

[mizzou]

It's going to be a pretty steady climb up unless software doesn't catch up with hardware. For instance, right now very few games really do a good job of spreading out multi-core technology. An 8 core CPU is really pretty extravagant and useless if software isn't properly using it.

I imagine a scenario though, where 64bit technology is really exploited and then we get a sudden boom in performance increases that benefit from higher levels of RAM

 

[escrow4]

I've had Far Cry 4 memory leak and bring memory usage up to 9GB total, but in something like GTA V I've seen close to 6GB in use. Less 1.5GB for Win 8.1 and that is over 4GB just for the game. 16GB should be the default for a gaming box, 8GB for the rest. For now anyway.

 

[Madpacket]

4GB of system is actually enough RAM for most games today, even 64 player BF4 runs just fine with 4GB but 6-8 is ideal longer term.

No game comes even close to needing 16GB and won't until the next consoles arrive (if they ever arrive). 2GB video RAM is also plenty @ 1080P with newer cards that have colour compression (Geforce 250/260 and Radeon 285 etc) although 3GB is ideal for the odd unoptomized game.

I know this is an enthusiasts site but be realistic here.

 

[Yuriman]

4GB of system is actually enough RAM for most games today, even 64 player BF4 runs just fine with 4GB but 6-8 is ideal longer term.

No game comes even close to needing 16GB and won't until the next consoles arrive (if they ever arrive). 2GB video RAM is also plenty @ 1080P with newer cards that have colour compression (Geforce 250/260 and Radeon 285 etc) although 3GB is ideal for the odd unoptomized game.

I know this is an enthusiasts site but be realistic here.

Last year I bumped my wife's PC from 4GB to 8GB because she was getting low memory notifications sometimes (mostly during Civ5).

 

[VirtualLarry]

Last year I bumped my wife's PC from 4GB to 8GB because she was getting low memory notifications sometimes (mostly during Civ5).

Did she have the pagefile disabled? Because, if you are getting "low memory" warnings, with a system-managed pagefile, that means that you've used up all of RAM, AND 3x RAM size worth of pagefile. So you probably should have put in 16GB of RAM.

 

[Yuriman]

It was a system managed pagefile, but I have Windows installed on a smallish SSD (80GB), so perhaps it was limiting the size? Anyway, the warnings have gone away with 8GB.

 

[Techhog]

Honestly? When consoles start coming with 16GB total RAM. It could happen in 3-5 years. It's possible.

I'd put my money on the next consoles using 32 or 64GB RAM.