How much RAM do current games use?

[jaqie]

"the box says it needs 2GB ram so it must be true"...
Sorry, that's so far removed from reality for most games that that means less than guessing does. Also, minimum requirements are for the game to crawl. Is that what you want?

 

[Scotteq]

A little old, but here's a great article on 64 bit and memory usage in a gaming context:
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3602/sponsored_feature_ram_vram_and_.php

Also:

Large Memory Support in Windows
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa366718(VS.85).aspx

4GB Tuning in Windows
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb613473(VS.85).aspx

 

[jimhsu]

I've commented on this before, but again:

For gaming, no. 4GB (right now) is fine. For content development, you might have a bit of a problem.

When developing content for games (i.e. modding), I frequently have the game, an editor, 3ds MAX, Photoshop, and miscellaneous other utilities open at the same time. Sometimes even something like the Visual Basic IDE or whatnot. Especially working with multiple or complex models, gigabytes of memory get sucked up in seconds. Memory usage approaches 8GB here, and sometimes I even get "memory too low" messages on a 8GB system.

The other scenario is After Effects. That program has to be the largest memory hog that Adobe ever developed, period. Each processor core? 2GB, or rendering might stall. RAM previews? Figure on 1GB per 20 seconds, MUCH more for HD content. The user interface itself? Basically 2GB. I'm not sure 12GB of RAM will cut it on a quad core system for that beast of a program. After effects on 4GB of memory is ... painful. Don't go there.

But then again, I will admit that my scenario is ... atypical. Most people play their games, and don't disassemble/mod/hack it into pieces.

 

[ValkyrAssassin]

I used a custom mod with Crysis, and the end level ended up using 3750Mb of the 4GB of RAM I was running, so IMO, for any heavy gamer that uses custom mods, then get more than 4GB RAM. In most situations 4GB seems fine though.