You Need LESS RAM Than You Think...

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Can you get away with 8GB of RAM while playing Starfield? Let's find out.
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[@linuxares]

In this episode, Dawid learns always to do a DDU when switching between Nvidia and AMD

[@patpatboy2]

Tonight, Dawid learns to DDU when switching between nVidia and AMD, gets confused why his gaming PC is running games well, and does an ad read.

[@Boogie_the_cat]

​@@patpatboy2most of this episode appears to be an ad. I'm getting bored 3 minutes in. I briefly got excited when he said "mounting with two screws" because I thought he was making an obscene joke. Giggity.

[@joel06sk]

Maybe he just wanted to flex on his rtx 4090

[@mariodroid7]

That's not a rule, I have uninstalled AMD drivers the usual way and I had no problems. Now, running DDU can mess up your Microsoft Office installation and a few other programs. Therefore, DDU should be your last resource if you are dealing with display corruption.

[@roastinpeace2320]

I'm literally running Nvidia and AMD gpus side by side for 2 years now (each having their own monitor) with both drivers installed and never had a single flicker.

[@patpatboy2]

I am genuinely surprised that these games ran just fine on only 8 GB of RAM... Maybe I should've never upgraded from my old Intel Core 2 Quad Q9550, 8 GB DDR2 800, GTX 560 SC gaming rig 🤣

[@Nightingale1887]

My second rig is a i5-2500K @ 4.4GHz DDR3 1600 8GB with a GTX1080 and it runs nearly all games, except really multicore heavy games.

[@patpatboy2]

​@@Nightingale1887 Just goes to show you that if your current PC is running your games well enough that you're happy, you don't NEED to upgrade just to have the latest stuff. I've got my younger brother setup on an i7-2400, 16 GB DDR3 1600, and a GTX 1050 Ti, and he's running games well enough that he's happy. Shoot, I'm only up to an i7-4790K (not overclocked, thanks to losing the silicon lottery), 16 GB DDR3 1600, and a GTX 1070, and I'm happy with how it runs the games I currently play. I'm sure I'll upgrade in the next year or two, but I've gotten a lot of good use out of this hardware!

[@basshead.]

My gaming setup: BSEL modded E2160, 4gb of ddr2, vmodded hd4670, 19" 1280x1024 I can run AAA games like Oblivion/Skyrim, Fallout 3/NV, Mass Effect 1/2/3, Dragon Age 1/2/3.

[@jponz85]

​@patpatboy2 I have a 4790k paired with a 3gb 1060 (lol I know) with 32gb ddr3 ram and surprisingly still plays every game I throw at it, even Escape from tarkov, cod, bf. I'm selling that though, not sure how much I should sell it for but yea that was my first built pc and did me wonder. Currently running a 6700k paired with a 1080 ti and of course it runs everything as well. Will probably sell that too (not sure for how much its worth) cause I just got a 13700k and a 3080 gpu.

[@HinaraT]

Most game are not really RAM intensive as long as your GPU as enought RAM (GDDR RAM), most of the RAM used by games is the cache of objects that you might need to send to the GPU. So decreasing the RAM amount does not really lower FPS, but tends to lower 99% in some case as there is more chance that some assets are not loaded even in RAM, so in this case you need to fetch them from your storage which is slow. The exemple he mentionned at the end of the video are typically management game which deal with a lot of "entities" and need to keep track about them which can consumme a greater amount of RAM.

[@bigal2688]

All of these "for science" videos you do are so awesome and Hilarious! Please keep them coming! 😂

[@DawidDoesTechStuff]

I’m glad you enjoy them. 😃

[@802Garage]

With a modern SSD, chances are the game allocates more to RAM when it's available and otherwise just prioritizes what is on RAM by what is needed right now. Then it can swap data between SSD and RAM quickly when necessary behind the scenes, so it really doesn't affect framerate. Try this test with an HDD and I bet the differences would be more drastic.

[@Phosphor_Sco]

Fair

[@-ZSOX]

Same results so you are wrong here too

[@Phosphor_Sco]

@@-ZSOX the plot thickens

[@Dorraj]

Pagefile has turned into magic nowadays. Before it was genuinely better to turn it off with HDDs, but now it's pretty dang useful.

[@DawidDoesTechStuff]

Yeah a couple of people mentioned that. It’s a great idea. I’ll check it out when I have time. 👍

[@DrearierSpider1]

Surprised 8GB is still holding up so well, albeit with dual channel configuration. I'm sure a big part of this is that you were using GPU's with 12GB of VRAM, so you were never VRAM limited. That's how these tests should be run so that system RAM is the only variable affecting results, but users attempting to get away with 8GB of system RAM will see a lot more performance issues if they don't have as much VRAM (on certain games and settings obviously).

[@DawidDoesTechStuff]

I was also thinking the VRAM could be the limiting factor. Something like a 3070Ti might be a good test for this as it’s fast but only has 8Gb of video memory.

[@DrearierSpider1]

@@DawidDoesTechStuff It'd make for an interesting video. But that would just be testing the 3070 Ti's performance hit when it runs out of VRAM. Typically when games run out of VRAM, they try to utilize system RAM to make up the difference, and if that runs out they'll jump over to using storage (SSD or HDD). Lower system RAM just increases the chance of a worse performance hit due to spillover into storage.

[@Zerbey]

@@DawidDoesTechStuff I doubt it, you'd just have to run with lower graphics settings as you've demonstrated with so many of the bargain basement PCs you've reviewed, pretty much all of them will run just about everything if you make a few compromises. Gaming PCs have reached something of a plateau the last few years, were really it's more about how much detail you want vs. the performance that matters.

[@R3TR0J4N]

True ram paging file I'm worried

[@greatwavefan397]

@@DawidDoesTechStuff Try a GTX 1650 :p

[@benedeklippai0203]

Maybe turn of pagefiles. If your SSD is fast enough windows uses it as memory Edit: True. Windows can utilize HDD too, but they are much slower, thus you can see it. But nowadays SDDs are getting so fast you can't even notice when pagefiles are in use

[@НААТ]

Not if your ssd is fast enough. Literally any ssd will do. Even on Hard drives that has been a thing. Also if you have 2gb vram and 16gb ram you actually have 10gb vram

[@bradhaines3142]

windows literally did that with hard drives, except when they did that it was PAINFULly obvious, now its a bit harder to tell because of ssd speed

[@DawidDoesTechStuff]

Maybe using page files with an HDD could be the way to get terrible performance with 8GB of Ram. 🤔

[@НААТ]

@@DawidDoesTechStuff i actually recently switched from my hdd i had since 2014 to a Kingston a400. And i can yell you boy did it make my amd fx feel like a threadripper🤣🤣. Still insanely trash. But sexier trash

[@OldManBadly]

@@DawidDoesTechStuff Better than that, set your page file to a USB 2 thumb drive. That should chop it off at the knees nicely.

[@cidelogic]

Perfect video to show to my friends that constantly try to argue that you need 32G of RAM for gaming.

[@SuperMickyChow]

You do if you play modded Cities Skylines!

[@schassismx3115]

Yea except these results would be different if he had chrome, discord, Spotify, rgb software, and whatever other bloatware normal users overlook running in the background. It’s definitely not necessary but nice to have, especially since ram is pretty affordable nowadays. For a budget rig you could pick up 32 gb of ddr4 3600 cl18 silicon power ram for like $37.

[@theoneneo5024]

As others have pointed out, when you start running several Chrome tabs with KZbin or streaming open on another monitor then the usage jumps a lot.

[@Xerou]

​@@schassismx3115did you miss the part in the video where he did all of that with only 8 gigabytes in the computer and it worked just fine?

[@Xerou]

​@@theoneneo5024you should watch the video again because in the ladder quarter of the video he does specifically that, even points out he had 30 Firefox tabs open and it made no difference

[@Yashuop]

Claim your “here within an hour” ticket right here🏆

[@masterswords7202]

Claimed

[@FRM_Yellow]

claimed

[@computerguy7451]

Lol

[@Tyear]

Thanks boss

[@DatOneGuy901]

Here within 5 mins

[@jponz85]

Actually pretty impressive video ngl. I've been telling people you don't need 32gb of ram to play games, 16gb is just enough, and apparently to my surprise, 8gb is still enough lol. I wonder if vram availability has anything to do with it since he is using a 13700k and 4090 gpu.

[@raylopez99]

Good point about VRAM. It shows me game developers tune their games to work on weak systems, since a lot of buyers of video games are kids with rappy systems (not all but a good number). A real baffling video. I have to say I watch Dawid for comedy but this was a shocker that no other channel has really mentioned.

[@Yasai_1204]

Yea, as the games might just be filling the VRAM buffer before using ram. Might explain why lower memory allocation didn't affect performance.

[@DawidDoesTechStuff]

Yeah I was also thinking the 24GB of VRAM was helping. When I get around to it I’ll have a look at how something like a 3070Ti holds up with just 8GB.

[@Sarajiel]

@@DawidDoesTechStuff You might want to check this with one of the Far Cry games in that case. Those actually use asset caching in VRAM, e.g. FC5 allocates up to 15GB during cutscenes on my RTX 4090, but it's happy with just up to 9GB on my GTX 1080Ti at highest settings. Also keep in mind that Starfield is basically an Xbox port to PC, therefore you can pretty much expect it not using more than 6GB RAM if your system is memory constrained.

[@Alekscho996]

​@@DawidDoesTechStuffplease test it with any 4gb vram card as well, when you get around to it, and thank you for the quality content!

[@eldibs]

Something I noticed when I finally upgraded from 8GB of RAM was that my FPS didn't change, my load times improved dramatically. I was having like full two-minute load times on Deus Ex: Mankind Divided (loading from an HDD) before the upgrade, afterwards it was only thirty-second load times, even though once I was in a level the performance was identical. Something you might consider testing.

[@Alekscho996]

Did you upgrade to a SSD along with the ram? Because that is most certainly to thank for the considerably faster load times.

[@eldibs]

@@Alekscho996 Nope. Just a straight RAM upgrade. It didn't affect boot times or anything like that, just load times for games. I assume it was because Windows suddenly wasn't having to throw a bunch of stuff in the paging file, which means less HDD reads/writes.

[@matt123337]

@@eldibs Could be the page file, but also windows caching reads to files in your 'unused' ram

[@Bllksem]

Another game that pretty regularly goes above 16 gigs of ram for me is hunt showdown, and when I had 16 gigs it was only using 10-12 iirc. Could be placebo, but in that case it did feel like it gave me more fps.

[@DawidDoesTechStuff]

I also thought that was the case with Tarkov but hey, if it feels better than does help. 👍

[@luzhang2982]

Unlike what people like to meme, the game actually is optimized. It will grab more ram when its available, and dump assets when it can't. Because it recognizes there are ram limits, it will actively adapt and there will be some extra loading because of it. Occasionally fps may spike because of that extra disk processes because of less ram

[@morganmedrano920]

You have to test it with Chrome running in the background. Honestly and considering how many games have multiple monitors, more tests should include some standard apps running in the background while gaming. Or running KZbin while gaming, or even while streaming.

[@AirCatcher]

I mean if you only have 8gb you wouldn't leave chrome open while playing games

[@AutomotiveRush]

@@AirCatcher i can confirm, i have been there lmao

[@daniil3815]

Absolutely agree, running only the game and msi afterburner to test RAM is nonsense. I usually have 10gb of RAM in use when I even turn on the game.

[@AutomotiveRush]

@@daniil3815 those are the sacrifices you make with only 8GB, of course it’ll crash with Chrome open in the background. Mines used to all the time before I upgraded to 16GB.

[@MultiDivebomber]

​@@AirCatcherI do that....I listen to youtube videos while running games at windowed mode for smooth multitasking. I have 12GB of RAM....it is fine, no stutter as well.

[@akivapilot]

I don't know why it is so entertaining to what Dawid being perplexed by failing to fail but it is. We need more accidental debunk videos!

[@WyvernDotRed]

This might be due to Proton shaders, but on my Linux desktop Horizon Zero Dawn did not work well at all with 8GB of RAM. And an online friend using Windows (and possibly an unreasonable amount of bloatware) needed a RAM upgrade too for the game. Otherwise, I haven't seen any game that hated 8GB of RAM, but on the occasional video edits I do, having 16GB helps a lot.

[@TuxikCE]

You didn't need to go DDR4 just to achieve 8GB. You can limit the amount of memory Windows can use through msconfig.

[@greatwavefan397]

Can you do the same for VRAM?

[@YoStu242]

SSD helps a lot. My friend has laptop with just 4GB of RAM and SSD but it felt incredibly snappy. Altough I also felt Windows chewing up that SSD with it's memory swapping operations

[@shofla]

Hogwarts Legacy would have been a good RAM test.

[@raylopez99]

I watch Dawid Does Tech Stuff for the comedy, but this time I was completely blown away by the science. Can we give a moment of appreciation for Dawid? Not even LTT and other channels in the millions of users have found out what Dawid discovered in this video, at least to my knowledge. Possibly even the professionally done Marques Brownlee channel with phones. Amazing work by Dawid. I'm speculating that game developers deliberately tweak their programs so they run nearly as well on weak hardware systems as they do on strong hardware systems. Or as another viewer wrote, maybe the VRAM compensates. Weird. I hope LTT does something to explain this after a hat tip to Dawid for discovering the phenomena.

[@orangeapples]

Around halfway through the video I was thinking, “wait, this is actually informative.”

[@vadnegru]

Digital foundry did video about 4 vs 8 gig of VRAM and they came to conclusion that ram is very important when there are no VRAM left

[@albundy7718]

8GB of RAM used to be enough not that long ago. Also like others already pointed out, Windows creates about the same amount of virtual RAM on the System Drive, which these days is usually a fast nvme SSD.

[@Tomazack]

Before watching this I'm sort of wondering if you haven't tested that like 20 times just this year? We already know the answer.

[@ej_tech]

Games nowadays benefit or even require an SSD. Even if it needs to go back and forth between volatile and non-volatile storage, at least it no longer has to wait for a slow mechanical hard drive to keep up. Try 8GB dual channel again but with the games on an HDD.

[@Drew-zp8dp]

A good example of why DDU is one of the first few troubleshooting methods before going to graphics card changes

[@tux9656]

You should have tested the amount of time it takes to lauch and relaunch a game as well as load and reload a map/level. Having less RAM means less of the file system is cached. I don't think it would make much of a difference with a nvme ssd, but I'd think that someone with only 8GB of RAM would be more likely to be running off a sata ssd or a mechanical drive.

[@akari2k561]

in certain games my monitor also flickers which I found was caused by having adaptive sync enabled, I even noticed the flickers on Starfield which was fixed by disabling freesync.

[@DawidDoesTechStuff]

I thought it was something like that, but I had adaptive sync turned off in the games I tested.

[@Dorraj]

I noticed flickering when playing PS5 games at "40fps" settings with ARR on. Most monitors can only ARR to a certain fps before having issues and cause it to flicker like that. I hate it.

[@Meoiswa]

I suspect having lower RAM won't affect *regular* performance that much, but it will increase the frequency of frame dips (reflected by the drastically lower 1% FPS). Ideally you'd want to either graph the FPS over time and compare how many dips there are among the different configurations, or get it numerically by... something like the second derivative of FPS/time?

[@Motolav]

It didn't change because he was using a 12gb VRAM card, the same testing on a 4/6/8gb card you'd see a difference

[@jamaicankyng]

Dawid is in the very small circle where I have to watch ALL videos.. such an original personality

[@isaacwalters1548]

I don't understand why, when I'm playing games my GPU isn't being fully used. It'll be on 40% GPU and 30% CPU. I'll be getting an average of about 70-100 Fps on Low - Max Setting. Idk if it's bottle necked. I'm using a GPU - RTX 4070-Ti CPU - Ryzen 5 5600x RAM - 16Gb - 3000 MHz MBD - A320M-A PRO SSD - Kingston SA400S37480g (I'm running windows 10 off it) HDD - Toshiba HDWD110 I run my games at 1440p 165hz on a single Monitor. All my drivers and stuff are all up to date also. appreciated

[@santinojoshuatorre1695]

you know Dawid's hit the big time when he does component swaps before DDU'ing.

[@DawidDoesTechStuff]

Haha!! In my defence, I forgot that I had an AMD GPU in this system before.

[@Sgt_SealCluber]

I usually get double the amount of RAM I think I'll need max, assuming prices aren't crazy, since I like to "future proof". My last system, 3770k with 32gb ddr3, I had for 11 years and I only replaced it because my CPU kicked it in 2023.

[@juanhernandez-ti3zn]

The games worked fine because of the swap file, if you disable it many games wont launch with 8gb, also if u put it in a slower drive (hdd or a sata ssd) it will probably reduce the performance

[@travisdonotsuscribegototjs9323]

even sata SSD would be just fine most of the time they hit 500mb/s even with newer drives maybe with no Dram since it uses system ram as a cache

[@asunavk69]

Haha had this happen on linux, 8gigs, now i got even more swap than the amount of ram just 9.5gigs.

[@Zebra_Paw]

I play Minecraft and my 32GB aren't enough, no cap! And it's expected! Anyone able to guess why?

[@ck275]

Rebar was enabled in the latest Nvidia drivers for 30/40 series, nice 5-10% performance uplift!

[@justsumguy2u]

The mobo on my prebuilt accepts 64 GB of RAM----I'm not trying to send men to the moon or change the space-time continuum, so not sure why I would need that

[@M.Godfrey]

I’m glad you done this video, I’m just about to upgrade from 32GB DDR5 to 64GB for absolutely no reason😂😮‍💨

[@berndkemmereit8252]

Play Anno 1800 and have 100k population. I had at the later stages 28GB ram usage, and I didn't even got close to 100k, and a big fleet. It depends on the game you play. Shooters and games where the "playfield" is static don't use much RAM and your fine with 16GB. Play any builder game and 32GB will not be enough.

[@leevi6026]

I have 64GB because when I bought it there was not much difference in prices between that kit and 32GB known dual rank kit and at least at that time with 64GB DDR4 there wasn't risk of being single rank. I thought it would be overkill, but lately I have been hoping I would have even more because I have been running out of ram 😄 I use virtual machines and lately I have discovered how useful ram drive is in some cases, so those (and tab hoarding) explains the need for more, not gaming.

[@jponz85]

Unless you're working for nasa, such an overkill for your pc

[@berndkemmereit8252]

@@jponz85 nope, as I said play Anno 1800 and have 150k population, you easy will use 30GB Ram.

[@jponz85]

@@berndkemmereit8252 yea ok dude.... suuuuure

[@Belnick6666]

i have had 32k ram as MINIMUM since 2014 or 2013? when did 4790k come? it still tugging along at 5ghz on my secondary comp, 8bm? is that not 2001 or something? windows xp black edition I think i had 8gb? or was it 12? it was when rampage extreme had TRI channel right? so 4x3?

[@RayanMADAO]

It seems the most important thing for gaming in terms of RAM is having dual channel for more bandwidth to the cpu and low latency rather than just more capacity. Which most of us already knew it's just some people like snobbing it up to justify their 64gb of ram. I've seen people unironically say 32gb is not enough for "future proofing" whatever that means

[@Electrify85]

Was chatting with someone on Facebook who said that 32 GB of RAM is the minimum he would ever consider for gaming. 🙄 (Currently have 8 GB of single stick RAM in my aging desktop, next on the upgrade path).

[@ShadowAngel1860]

A few games can actually easily fill up 64 gigs of Ram. Cities Skylines being the prime example. Use all DLCs and load in a bunch of mods and graphical assets from the Workshop and you get "out of memory" messages with 32 gigs very, very easily. So you better have 64 gigs if you want to go crazy with mods and assets there. Can't wait to see if Cities Skylines 2 will be the same ram eating monster. IL DIVINO: Michelangelo's Sistine Ceiling in VR is another "game" that recommends 64 gigs. And there's nothing wrong with future proofing. If you're not poor and you can afford it, why not drop in 64 gigs today? There's nothing wrong with it.

[@luzhang2982]

@@ShadowAngel1860 Also consider Rimworld, a game that you normally use less than 1gig on the primary storage drive... I've heavily modded it and made it use 40 gigs of memory alone. Modding gets nuts and 64 is definitely recommended for heavy modders. If you don't, then yeah 32 is great. 16 is bare minimum now, and you will suffer for it.

[@experio1739]

You can dedicate RAM to your iGPU by using a custom BIOS which you can do by using rufos, a USB and some other stuff. There's KZbin videos on how to do that and I recommend trying it out. I've done it for my Ryzen 7 5700u which has a Radeon RX Vega 8 iGPU.

[@Trusteft]

Try to set your monitor's brightness to 100% with monitor's contrast to 50% and see if the flickering is still there. As for RAM, a bit surprised myself. I do tend to have at least 100s tabs open in Opera (up to a couple of thousand) which after a while it tends to eat up a bit of RAM, but since the rest of my machine is almost 9yo now, I tend to close it when gaming demanding games. Perhaps you could try with some video editing in the background, but I guess no one in their right mind would do that if they knew they had only 8GB of RAM and trying to play RAM hungry games.

[@stoneymahoney9106]

That flickering has been a known problem with G-sync since forever, especially when you enable it for windowed applications as well as exclusive fullscreen ones. G-sync was designed assuming that whatever it's displaying is refreshing as fast as possible and doesn't really know what to do when the focused application doesn't regularly refresh it's graphics output. If some window you have open is refreshing just below the minimum native refresh rate, the g-sync module in the monitor gets REALLY confused, and that's when you see that flickering. (tl;dr - flickering means turn off windowed g-sync)

[@Xerou]

I mean he could try it that way but nobody in their right mind would run video rendering software while gaming at the same time.

[@Trusteft]

@@Xerou Eh, I do it all the time with less demanding games (for example Fallout 3, or 2D games), and I used to do it even back when I had my quad core Q or E something something. (bad memory). And my computer now kinda sucks for 2023 (i7 5960X, GTX 1660 Super). Of course I have 64GB of RAM in quad channel, but still even before it was possibly depending on the game.

[@lewzealand4717]

Both those cards have 12GB VRAM so they can keep all game assets loaded there. Try with 8GB (3070 Ti or 7600) or 6GB (2060 or 5600 XT) and I'll bet you see a bigger hit to FPS with 8GB (maybe even 16GB?) even though those are lower performance GPUs.

[@-ZSOX]

Nope same results here too Page files do magic

[@lewzealand4717]

Same results where?

[@robertaillery5413]

I used to have a monitor that would only flicker when FreeSync was enabled. I know it happens to GSync monitors too. Pretty typical of VA panels.

[@chiefisreal3476]

Starfield still suffering from that TDP bug for Nvidia GPUs. Usually the 4090 to uses about 400 watts of power but for star field it's under 300... My EVGA 3070 for the win is still using about 70 watts under what it should.

[@satoriikei257]

Maybe 8GB kit works just as well as 16 thanks to fast ssd? not only it is fast enough to load stuff in time but also it is used as virtual ram (pagefile).

[@НААТ]

Its also used as vram

[@balaran4349]

I strait up went with 32GB of ram with the DDR5 upgrade because fuck RAM usage seriously....

[@13bmitchell]

I'm guessing because your running the tests @ 1440p, it might not be stressing the CPU as much. Interested to see the same test @ 1080p and see what happens.

[@lorenzofal2068]

high fps (?)

[@espi742]

It would be the same. As long as the date required fits in the memory its going to be fine.

[@jponz85]

Why would you think less resolution scale would indicate less performance? What!?!?!? 😂😂😂

[@tibib0ss]

16 GB is good if you have nothing running in the background. 32gb is better if you wanna have other things running in the background like chrome , firefox , discord or even streaming tools.

[@ayeimjustabackup]

been saying for a while that 32gb is necessary these days. MINIMUM 16 GIGS. But if you want a comfortable experience where you never gotta worry about it without being complete overkill, 32gb is the sweet spot

[@Rhino4272]

If anything, Dawid has talked me out of upgrading to 32gb. Based on what we saw here, 16gb will be fine for at least another year or two

[@TheCudder4life]

Did you not watch the video? Clearly 32 is overkill still.

[@ayeimjustabackup]

nah its not. yes i did watch the video. clearly 32gb was the only one producing max ram output without any sacrificing. thats fine, you can run games where youre sacrificing ram, you might not be able to see why but youre dropping something somewhere. ill keep playing on my 32gig and never worrying about any of this bs lol@@TheCudder4life

[@ayeimjustabackup]

another year isnt good enough for me lol if it was good for another 3-5 sure. but if your saying in 1 year your probably going to have to upgrade ur ram, and it already doesnt output max ram capabilities then why not just have 32 and be comfortable knowing youre good for the next 5 years. its like $20@@Rhino4272

[@Rhino4272]

@ayeimjustabackup There are no discernable differences between 16 and 32. The next time I upgrade, it will be to DDR5. 32 is a waste for gaming at this point

[@player18792]

I have 32gb and I never max it out unless I’m doing some crazy virtualization. I have enough to run a game, a virtual machine, and browse the internet all at the same time if I wanted

[@brandonfulstone7628]

I know 8gb of ram is fine for some modern games, while it'll have a hard time with other modern games

[@shawnd567]

Redo the test using a sata SSD. My guess is the nvme 2 ssds are so damn fast that they are basically as fast as ram in those situations.

[@shawnd567]

I'm actually surprised how few people mention nvme SSD. Some have noted ssd vs HDD but the speed difference between nvme SSD and SATA SSD are huge. Roughly 10x (500mbs vs 5000mbs) Retest this with a SATA SSD and there will be a huge difference.

[@brandoneadie8566]

I wonder if the games are using your Hard drive as RAM storage when your only at 8GB of ram, so maybe see what happens if you use a mechanical drive instead of an SSD drive.

[@lukasvincourcz7043]

if i'm correct it should write some RAM data onto the drive as a cache but idk how to describe it

[@brandoneadie8566]

@@lukasvincourcz7043 yup. Seems like a lot of people mention what i said as well. Its alot less noticeable with nvme drives though with how quick read and writes are.

[@heinz2554]

Also having a good cpu helps with less ram. If you have an average cpu or mid range u won’t be able to run these games or if at all smoothly. So this title is misleading

[@Liinuli.]

Like others have said I think it's the NVME SSD. I had a laptop with 4gb memory and it wasn't that bad most of the time, because it had an NVME. If you used a HDD or a Sata SSD I think it would be far more noticable.

[@tenthiddy]

Two are just fine.

[@aptspire]

Sounds like 16 gb will work fine with just about anything

[@1NIGHTMAREGAMER]

Here's something u didn't think about if u only have 8gb ram it uses ur storage it's ok if it's a HDD but if u have nvme m.2 drive it will eat ur drives lifespan only time 8gb only makes difference is if ur being dumb or screwed over by OEM and is running off a stupid hdd

[@1NIGHTMAREGAMER]

Ok here's the scenario put a 2tb HDD as boot drive retest the ram configs and you'll see an absolute slaughter house to ur fps (a OEM has cheaper out as always and slapped HDD in ur shiney new rig and you don't know better )

[@espi742]

It really goes to show how good modern operating systems are at managing RAM. They compress and swap uncommonly used pages, saving tons of memory. Fast storage can help make swap so fast that its barely perceptible when data is swapped. Maybe if you tried 8GB of RAM on an HDD instead of an SSD it would make more of a difference. Now, I don't use MSI Afterburner so I might be wrong, but I'm pretty sure that the "RAM" number is not allocation, but actual "memory usage". There are a lot of terms and nuances here: - "Allocated memory", called "Committed" by Windows and "Virtual memory" by Linux: represents how much memory the program asked the OS, largely irrelevant number, some programs ask for hundreds of GB of memory and never use it (Chrome on Linux usually asks for upwards of 120GB of memory for example) - "Used memory", called "Used" by Windows and "Anonymous memory" by Linux: represents how much memory the program is physically using, usually only physically allocated when the program writes to it. The GPU "MEM" field of afterburner probably refers to memory allocated, while the CPU "MEM" field very probably refers to used memory.

[@vlad54rus-a]

GPU MEM refers to VRAM. Afterburner doesn't list committed memory by default, but it can be added from PerfCounters data sources.

[@evansteinmetz9522]

I wonder if you desolder all of the pins from an amd cpu will it work in an intel board? Lol weird yet possible video idea?

[@Minto107]

Windows is really good at RAM allocation. The more you have the more stuff will be allocated to the physical RAM, when you game with just 8GBs then most of Windows stuff is thrown to the swap memory so all game assets can be loaded to the RAM memory

[@jaykayismyname]

Quick question for any techies in these comments: if I own a prebuilt that came with two sticks of 8 GB 3200 mhz RAM and four channels, and I bought two sticks of 16 GB 3200 mhz RAM, should I just install them in the other two channels, or should I replace the 8 GB sticks entirely?

[@RayanMADAO]

Install them in the empty slots. And you most likely don't have quad channel, you have dual channel and 4 slots with each channel having 2 slots. Only workstation class motherboards and cpus have quad channel

[@dogfrog9543]

They should be fine as they are the same speed

[@groenevinger3893]

you can put them in the two addional slots, you will have 48gb

[@TheRealConflictedGaming]

I got 16gb of ddr4 ram and it’s served me well thus far.

[@bzanzaFN]

BeamNG is a great test of ram, I get 27 gigs allocated playing casually

[@oGian_]

first

[@Neil_Hanson]

You should have tried Hogwarts Legacy. I've seen that use 25GB of ram before, and it's always above 20GB.

[@allenellisdewitt]

8 gigs is too little for just using windows and a browser in 2023 LOL

[@Mertiven]

But you probably cant see that far or in low resolution

[@exteriormv_9184]

can you test 8gb ram in windows 11 ! it will be hilarous 💀☠

[@Plaguey01]

i game on a low ish end laptop from 2009 with a juicy 64mb of ddr2 vram, and 4gb of ram

[@johnathansmith1003]

32gb is new standard, next question.

[@rafalolszewski6174]

Try to allocate swap in old HDD not on a fast ssd. If you turn it off magic will happen 😅

[@pyroslev]

I think Windows 11's task scheduler made some difference. Should try this again with a current Windows 10 install.

[@drizzle8309]

Task scheduler? Does that do anything that affects ram/performance?

[@alexthegiant7864]

So I am also wondering if you are using ssd's in all your examples? Consider maybe swapping to hdd and see what happens? Im wondering if the page swaps have become very good on ssds that it becomes unnoticed, whereas if you use classic hdd, you'll see a difference. Something to test and do a part 2?

[@aizazrehman5153]

My mans really let the hairs grow and I love it

[@nitropack777]

My guess is that the pc is using the pagefile system to make up for less available RAM allocation

[@everythingpony]

That's exactly what's happening

[@HR-wd6cw]

My guess is that while some may RECOMMEND 16GB of more, they may all mostly play with 8GB and if there is extra RAM needed, perhaps it re-adjusts the graphics load to allow the video card to perhaps handle a bit more processing that the RAM otherwise would perhaps. So for example, texture data or player movement, although maybe the video card does handle all of this. But my guess is that 16GB or higher probably assumes you have other stuff running in the background, and that the OS will consume 4GB just by itself.

[@berndkemmereit8252]

Try Anno 1800 and start building and watch your Ram go up. I had my system Pull 28GB and I didn't even have a massive fleet and over 150k population. At the start you can run it on 8GB, but pretty fast it is not enough.

[@TheImperialCult]

Man I had 8gb RAM until like 2 months ago. PC I bought in 2018 was supposed to have 16 but one of the slots was bad and would cause a complete hard freeze randomly like once a day. By the time I figured out it was the RAM slot didn’t feel worth returning. So 8gb it was for like 6 years. I feel so free now like my PC isn’t sitting there demanding I close everything down if I stop using it for 10 minutes

[@picklechin2716]

Should have done the tarkov ones in scav runs, as the AI are the cpu/ram hogs.

[@picklechin2716]

Nvm, the accidental real raid shows it.

[@Dorraj]

Dawid you're making the same mistake you did when testing vram. You. Have. To. Turn. All. Settings. Up. Seeing you go "so we're at medium settings 1440p" and I'm like "I thought you were trying to use as much ram as possible??" Turn those settings up all the way, turn RT to max, turn the res to 4K. That's the best way to use as much ram as possible. Also play FF15. It sounds weird, but that's the only game I've seen almost max out my 32GB of ram. For why it didn't make too much a difference: Games/Windows are smart when it comes to ram allocation. What you should have tested was how usability was when playing the games, like googling or watching yt videos when the game is running. Also I assume you have windows on an SSD, so the pagefile is on that SSD, so it's just allocating the extra ram it needs onto the pagefile.

[@Boogie_the_cat]

30 firefox windows. I don't think that was excessive. I'm pretty sure 30 is well within normal use case scenarios. Clearly Dawid doesn't have proper OCD and isn't manic enough to realize that excessive tab use only really begins at 60 tabs. What a non-spaz.

[@mathesar]

I had to run a single 16GB stick for a week while waiting for a 32GB (2x16) kit to be replaced via RMA, It's defiantly a bad idea configuring a PC with 1 stick on purpose as you get a lot of stuttering that wouldn't happen with 2 sticks / dual channel mode.

[@sephirotic87]

Fun fact. I have a Legion 5 Laptop with a RTX 3060 with 6gb vram and originally 16gb of ram (1gb of shared GPU memory to the VEGA 8 of the 5800h). Last of us would stutter and average under 40fps at 1080p mid~high and crash in a few minutes. I thought VRAM was the issue, but after I upgraded to 32gb of RAM, the game run flawlessly at 50+ fps most of the time, with full VRAM allocation (mixed mid-high settings, high texture for chracacter models). Few VRAM memory offloads some assets (not all) to the system ram. My 3090 uses far less ram even with higher settings in Last of us than my Notebook. Ram utilization on my notebook was about 22gb of ram for TLOU Emulation, DCS and Tarkov are notorious for demading more than 16gb of RAM. Unfortunately 16gb is not enough even with a mid-tier graphic card like the 3060.

[@TheImperialCult]

You’d notice a difference if you were running the games from a 7200RPM - regardless RAM isn’t often going to do anything to fps just lag spikes from loading

[@DJboutit2]

IMO lowest amount of ram in 2023 12gb it should be DDR 4 4000 MHz or DDR 5 for games that only need a 6GB video card like GTA 5 Minecraft Fortnite and Dota 2. If you want to play Cyberpunk Doom Eternal or Last Of Us you will need a 12gb video card and 24gb ram to play these games smoothly at a decent FPS. You should do a video testing games with 12gb ram with a mid level 8gb video card.

[@administratorwsv8105]

I would have tested with Windows page-file disabled. I usually have this disabled for systems with adequate RAM and an SSD (It should in theory help with the drive's lifespan for it prevents unnecessary reads / writes from RAM to SSD)

[@sidewinder86ify]

This is a good benchmark, saving this one. Thanks.

[@jmas081391]

I Platinum/100% achievement Elden Ring on this Potato PC: Athlon 200ge 2x4gb RAM RX580 2048sp 8GB. Stuttering only happens after the initial loading of the game from the menu.

[@Nicky_Otto]

Great video, with surprising results, guess 8gb is not so bad, yet. ARK Survival Evolved also LOVES RAM, especially when using mods.

[@swiftrealm]

You should have tried MS Flight Sim with 8 GB. It does not like that when you go into densely populated areas.

[@TerrorTales4271998]

i fr run a rx580 8gb with a 240gb evo and 32gbs of ram why idk its ddr3 and i had plenty from my old mac pro, also just a i7 2600 nothing too wild very good match i think does all i need ps2 and such

[@The_Burrito]

It's definitely sims that do better with more RAM. Digital Combat Simulator needs 64GB if you're playing on a server with a bunch of scripts running.

[@BREEZYM6015]

Try gaming on a Core 2 Duo with 6GB of RAM and a Geforce 210 with 512mb of RAM in 2023. 😂

[@otacon5648]

Most ram I’ve ever seen used on a game was the original WarZone and it used just over 24gb at 4K high settings. Madness.

[@Q-bazZ]

In my case - GOW 2018 used up to 26+ Gigs, due to memory "leak" bug, before latest patch. 😮

[@samanthagriffinv2.08]

I can’t get the last of up to work at all on 16 go of ram 2x8gb @3600 MHz I bought a 32gb ram kit 2x16gb and we’ll see if it dose work if so that would be infinitely important cuz it wouldn’t load in the first place why say min 16 gb of ram and it not work seemingly it’s really minimum 32gb of ram

[@aKiSeraphic]

Here's the thing most people don't get, modern windows set to automatically allocate/uses your storage(your SSD) as virtual ram when you don't have enough ram. It's not that 8GB is sufficient, is actually not, is just that your strorage is being used as virtual ram, it does shorten your SSD lifespan. Turning off virtual ram allocation will definitely crash 99% of the modern games out there with windows+the game itself.

[@TheLotw]

Problems with Starfield are Windows based. As almost all people playing on Linux using Proton works fine. I have had ZERO issues, except for the normal Bethesda issue of crashing to desktop and why they always save on load, etc.

[@KamalAhmed-ol7mp]

Love From Bangladesh ❤🇧🇩

[@PannyLanny]

If you try warzone 2 on 8gb ram, you will feel pain (I had to switch to 32gb ram just because of warzone 2 because apparently 16gb wasnt enough and giving me fps drops to 30fps every 30 seconds or so)

[@f688xt6]

Honestly, I've had no issues with Starfield. But I'm on AMD CPU and GPU... so there's that.

[@Khuros]

Try DCS world for ram usage. That game makes 32GB seem like 8gb very quickly. It can use over 64GB if you have it.

[@cholohd32]

The Ram issue with Tarkov is that the game is a buggy mess & that is probably why the game has a "clear memory" option too. Memory leaks happens all the time especially the longer you play. Usually nothing that my 32gb ram cant handle but i did have a rare situation happen where after 4 hours or so i went to the Woods map & the game was stuttering halfway into the raid? I opened task manager & the game was using close to 26gb of my ram on 1080p low/medium? I managed to exfil & a quick reboot of the game fixed everything. Now that is a rare event that it goes that high but 16GB is a really low bar for that game. Espcially if you ahve a second monitor for like youtube/twitch etc. so you base memory gets even smaller & many games dont take that into account.

[@GrumpyWolfTech]

If you think that is a lot of vram I suggest you go play diablo 4, it will literally eat all your vram, I've seen it use 11gb on a 3080ti and 22.5gb on a 7900xtx