How long will 8GB last for gaming?

[Joseph F]

I recently bought 8GB of DDR3 because it was on sale. I am planning to build a Sandy Bridge or Bulldozer rig later this year and I was just wondering how long would 8GB last until I'd have serious stuttering while playing games.
My best guess would be 2013 but I just wanted to hear some external input on this.

 

[StrangerGuy]

I bet by the time 8GB is beginning to becoming obselete, a 8GB stick of DDR(4,5,6) will be like $20.

 

[StinkyPinky]

I recently bought 8GB of DDR3 because it was on sale. I am planning to build a Sandy Bridge or Bulldozer rig later this year and I was just wondering how long would 8GB last until I'd have serious stuttering while playing games.
My best guess would be 2013 but I just wanted to hear some external input on this.

No way. No games currently in development will even get close to pushing 8GB.

More like 2016-17 at least.

 

[Dark Shroud]

I have yet to fill even half my memory. I almost went with a 16GB kit but I couldn't budget it at the time. Now I'm glad I didn't go through with it.

 

[lamedude]

Bloatfield2 made us all upgrade from 1GB to 2 so until BF3 comes out.
Joking aside there is only like a dozen 64bit & 32bit large address aware (can use 4GB instead of 2) games out today so we got to kill 32bit support first before we can even think about using half that much RAM. XP support ends in 2014 and the nex gen consoles should be out by then.

 

[Veliko]

By the time 8GB of RAM is considered too little our CPU will be too slow anyway.

 

[dawp]

I recently bought 8GB of DDR3 because it was on sale. I am planning to build a Sandy Bridge or Bulldozer rig later this year and I was just wondering how long would 8GB last until I'd have serious stuttering while playing games.
My best guess would be 2013 but I just wanted to hear some external input on this.

you can game perfectly well with 4 gig right now, by the time 8 gig are reaching the limits, it'll be closer to 2020 if not beyond. In reality, the OS will chew up more memory with added features and multitasking than gaming will.

 

[Zap]

6 years, 3 months, 8 days, 24 hours, 13 minutes and 12 seconds.

Oh wait, as I typed that 20 seconds have passed, so it is now 6 years, 3 months, 8 days, 24 hours, 12 minutes... Drat! More time has passed. It is now...

Okay, all joking aside, I think even 4GB will last a long, LONG time for gamers. Why? Because all games being made are still targeting 32-bit operating systems, meaning they will have only 2GB of addressing space. Companies would not want to alienate gamers who don't have 64-bit operating systems.

 

[Farmer]

I liked your old photo better dude.

 

[Voo]

Okay, all joking aside, I think even 4GB will last a long, LONG time for gamers. Why? Because all games being made are still targeting 32-bit operating systems, meaning they will have only 2GB of addressing space. Companies would not want to alienate gamers who don't have 64-bit operating systems.

Argh that's what I wanted to say

Most games still ship with 32bit exes (and only if you're lucky include a 64bit one as well), although with the advance of win7 64bit (who in their right mind gets 32bit if they don't have a really good reason?) that could change faster than I'd have thought a year ago. At least games targeting Vista+ (ie using DX11) could probably neglect the 32bit crowd.

But as long as XP has a ~50% market share or whatever? No way in hell.

 

[gramboh]

If an application/game is built with a 32-bit exe, that means the game can only address up to ~4GB of RAM, correct?

In Bad Company 2 and TF2, I'm usually one of the first people in after map changes, which is odd as I have an older rig with no SSD and only 4GB ram. Unless you are running other memory heavy tasks in the background while gaming (which no one does), 8GB will be good for years.

 

[Voo]

If an application/game is built with a 32-bit exe, that means the game can only address up to ~4GB of RAM, correct?

Under Windows without the /3gb switch only 2gb - and even with that only up to 3gb (a 32bit app under 64bit windows with that switch 4gb though)

 

[biostud]

Bloatfield2 made us all upgrade from 1GB to 2 so until BF3 comes out.

BF3 will push 4Gb
BF4 will push 8Gb
...

 

[aigomorla]

I recently bought 8GB of DDR3 because it was on sale. I am planning to build a Sandy Bridge or Bulldozer rig later this year and I was just wondering how long would 8GB last until I'd have serious stuttering while playing games.
My best guess would be 2013 but I just wanted to hear some external input on this.

are you serious?

>.<

how about we restate that.... because i dont think 4gigs will ever be called minimum for any game for a very very long time.

8 gigs... is just WOW... that means on average 2gb allocated for system resources... and then 6gb allocated for everything else.

At most ive seen a very nasty game take up 2gigs... AT MOST....
Most just take up half to less then half... but your telling me when will a game come out which will take up more then 6gb's of ram?

Never....

Because game require more video ram then System Ram for rendering objects, then telling the object its at location X moving to location Y.

 

[Bauss]

Another thing to consider is that, upto this point, modern OSs and software has been designed for HDDs. Meaning, they were designed to avoid accessing the drive as much as possible. Instead, they've cached more data to RAM.

As SSDs become more mainstream, developers will start to be able to keep more data on disk, instead of piling as much into RAM as possible. This is due to an SSDs much lower access latency.

So, I imagine that over the next decade or so, you'll see software more and more optimized for SSDs, thereby making the need to aggressively cache less important.

I don't see average users needing more than 4GB of RAM for a while. As for 8GB? 2020 maybe?

 

[Voo]

Another thing to consider is that, upto this point, modern OSs and software has been designed for HDDs. Meaning, they were designed to avoid accessing the drive as much as possible. Instead, they've cached more data to RAM.

As SSDs become more mainstream, developers will start to be able to keep more data on disk, instead of piling as much into RAM as possible. This is due to an SSDs much lower access latency.

Oh goodness. No they won't - well hopefully. *shudders*. You're really advocating replacing access times in the single digit nano seconds with an order of magnitude higher and an even lower bandwidth?
Just because SSDs are faster than HDDs doesn't mean they aren't awfully slow compared to DRAM.

 

[Bauss]

Oh goodness. No they won't - well hopefully. *shudders*. You're really advocating replacing access times in the single digit nano seconds with an order of magnitude higher and an even lower bandwidth?
Just because SSDs are faster than HDDs doesn't mean they aren't awfully slow compared to DRAM.

I'm not advocating anything. I'm well aware that SSDs still have much higher access latency than RAM. All I'm saying is that I think SSDs will begin to have a larger role in a few specialized applications as they become more popular. Furthermore, this trend won't bode well for RAM as it only gets increased when the need is there for it to be increased.

 

[Joseph F]

I liked your old photo better dude.

I agree. I'm going to take another one soon.

 

[StinkyPinky]

If all you do is game and browse the net (like me) then 8GB will be enough for a very long time. Certainly longer than the current lifespan of your PC.

2013 is barely 18 months away.

 

[SickBeast]

The migration to x64 platforms is what's holding us back in terms of memory. It's been a painstakingly slow process. It could be several years still before x64 is the "standard" version of Windows.

Until that point in time, programs can only use 2gb of memory each, making 4gb of memory just fine for pretty much all current games.

 

[Edrick]

My best guess would be 2013

Please explain to us how in the world you could possibly come to that conclusion?

 

[Zap]

If an application/game is built with a 32-bit exe, that means the game can only address up to ~4GB of RAM, correct?

Under Windows without the /3gb switch only 2gb - and even with that only up to 3gb (a 32bit app under 64bit windows with that switch 4gb though)

BF3 will push 4Gb
BF4 will push 8Gb

Let me put it bluntly. Publishers are not willing to forgo big chunks of the market, so until 32-bit operating systems are a miniscule minority of the systems in actual use, they will NOT make any games that are not capable of operating under an unmodified 32-bit operating system with the 2GB limit. Heck, there are still systems shipping with 32-bit Windows 7 right now, let alone all the 32-bit Windows 7/Vista/XP out there currently in use.

http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey
32-bit Windows 7/Vista/XP adds up to 44.09%

The other thing which might be more important is that it seems a lot of games these days are basically console ports. 'Nuff said.