Do I need to upgrade from 8GB to 16GB of RAM?

[GreiverBlade]

More and more games are using 8GB of RAM or more. Dbiggs9 said 11GB for GTA V. I've see Dragon Age Iquisition easily use 7. The 6GB VRAM frame buffer on the 980Ti you are getting will mostly make use of texture memory. Some of these games have alot more than textures to load up, containing mammoth amounts of data in the RAM.
We are almost at the end of the "8GB is enough" days.

EDIT: I've said this several times in the last few months, and I think it's time for all of us to stop advising people that 8GB is all they need. We're a tech site, and it should be obvious which direction games are going, so we should be adapting as well.

totally agreed, i went from 8gb 2133 (CL9 ) to 16gb 2400 (well ... 10-12-12-31) i notice some difference since i mostly have Chrome and a bazillion tabs open + some game depending on what i play (Ark: Survival Evolved is also a good example ) but nothing really "huge" tho with the price of 2x8gb DDR3 it's kinda a good option

the only comp where 8gb is the max for me is my laptop ... and i directly upgraded from 4gb single channel 1600 11-11-11-31 to 8gb 1600 9-9-9-28

if you have the mean to go 16gb and find a good deal/offer on it : go for it, it's what i did with my main rig

 

[FreedomEclipse]

If youre a power user then 16GB is a must if not 32GB.

 

[EarthDog]

Depends on what a 'power user' is and what they are actually doing.

I suggest people to not focus on subjective titles like that but to actually see if users are close to using what they have.

 

[Countryside]

Hmm it was like yesterday when 512mb of ram was a enough and now 8 or 16gb time flies fast ohh don't mind me just feeling nostalgic.

 

[Toothless]

Hmm it was like yesterday when 512mb of ram was a enough and now 8 or 16gb time flies fast ohh don't mind me just feeling nostalgic.

I did a lot with my 256mb at one point, given L4D2 was a very slow slideshow.

 

[FreedomEclipse]

Depends on what a 'power user' is and what they are actually doing.

I suggest people to not focus on subjective titles like that but to actually see if users are close to using what they have.

Personally - I have two web browsers - both with loads of tabs open, Skype, steam, Vuze and guildwars 2 running and i sit at about 10gig ram usage.

 

[jboydgolfer]

buy the extra..Its cheap as hell, and it wont Decrease performance...I was Glad I bought 16Gb when i built a 2nd PC a while ago, and didn't want to buy RAM...I just took 8Gb's outta My main PC...then when I HAD the $$ for the New machines RAM, i put it back in the machine it was originally in.it cant hurt to have more than is needed everyday.

 

[Bo$$]

if you are still using Windows 7 like me, 16GB is very likely going to help you, i've seen most games break the 8gb limit and some reach almost 12gb. FPS wise i'd doubt it makes too much difference but you do feel the difference when you have lots of stuff open.

 

[tabascosauz]

I've always stuck with 8GB, including in GTA V, which fit comfortably in what RAM I had. I always felt pretty safe with it. That is, until yesterday, when FC4 crashed because I had 3 chrome tabs open and 8GB wasn't enough to share between a horribly optimised game and Chrome the Memory Hog.

But then again, is upgrading really worth it? The problem with ITX is that I can't just add 4GB to cobble together a Flex mem config of 12GB or add another identical 8GB kit; I'd have to buy a new 16GB kit.

 

[FireFox]

when FC4 crashed, But then again, is upgrading really worth it?

Well if you're okay with Games crashing then upgrading it's not worth.

 

[peche]

well i have 16GB of ram on both i7's.... work rig and personal gaming rig, on work rig that ram helps me a lot, because i restart my computer every 5 or 6 days, several chrome tabs open, some other programs and apps, so 16Gb is not a overkill on this computer, on the gaming rig is extra ram thats it,

so the OP can add a identical 2x4GB kit to his system or sell the current 2X4GB kit and get a 2X8GB kit, i rather 2x8Gb kits over 4x4GB kits... personally!

Regards,

 

[Easy Rhino]

Yes.

 

[FireFox]

Yes.

Very specific Response

 

[Pill Monster]

One foolproof way to find out is to disable the PF then fire up the most intensive game you have.

If u need more RAM, you'll soon know.

 

[AsRock]

I've always stuck with 8GB, including in GTA V, which fit comfortably in what RAM I had. I always felt pretty safe with it. That is, until yesterday, when FC4 crashed because I had 3 chrome tabs open and 8GB wasn't enough to share between a horribly optimised game and Chrome the Memory Hog.

But then again, is upgrading really worth it? The problem with ITX is that I can't just add 4GB to cobble together a Flex mem config of 12GB or add another identical 8GB kit; I'd have to buy a new 16GB kit.

FC3 is fairly well optimized and sounds more like Cromes is a lot less optimized than the game.

I went 16Gb long time ago due to running out of memory with the odd game or getting close.

 

[RealNeil]

I use 16GB on all of my PCs, but recently bought 8GB of 2400MHz DDR3 to see if it was much better than the 2133MHz I had.
It's not much quicker, but I just got another 8GB to match it and installed it on the i7-4790K box.

The PC seemed to game the same with 8GB instead of 16GB.

 

[Aquinus]

With the page file turned off, I use between 7.5gb and 9gb of memory and ED isn't exactly the most memory consuming game. I've seen my machine using up to 11.5GB on a much more regular basis than I used to as before I was barely going over 8GB in some more rare occasions a couple years ago but, it's most definitely true that software (not just games, but browsers too,) are using more memory than they have in the past. If you don't plan on upgrading the platform too soon, 16GB isn't a bad longevity upgrade. It's kind of like that 8GB on the 390(x), there may not be any games that really use that much now, but I wouldn't be surprised if there were in a year or two. For example, chrome has 4 tabs open and it's eating 0.5GB when 2 years ago it would have been 200-300MB. Just saying, it might not help performance, but it will when you need more memory which could be sooner than you realize.

 

[Atomic77]

I was told when getting a computer get one that has the most ram you can possibly afford. Ram is the easiest thing you can do to help a computer. my computer im currently using has 12gb ram and that was it came with when I bought it.

 

[Pill Monster]

I was told when getting a computer get one that has the most ram you can possibly afford. Ram is the easiest thing you can do to help a computer. my computer im currently using has 12gb ram and that was it came with when I bought it.

Sounds like something a salesman would say...

More RAM does help - when you don't have enough of it, but adding ram for the sake of adding ram is a waste of money.

The only real reason to do it is if your system runs out of physical and starts paging to disk (for those 27 die-hards still using a pagefile ).


Comparison would be parking your car in a 4 car garage instead of the 2 car garage beside it.

 

[Jetster]

If youre a power user then 16GB is a must if not 32GB.

What the hell does that mean?



Really you wont even tell the difference. If your swap file is on your SSD then it will just use that if it goes over. Or just get the 16 Gb

 

[rooivalk]

16GB would be an improvement but I think it's rather miniscule. If you have plan to upgrade to Skylake, better stay with 8GB for a while.
I don't really believe RAM usage reading. It seems like apps/games will allocate RAM as much as they can not as they need.

 

[FreedomEclipse]

What the hell does that mean?



Really you wont even tell the difference. If your swap file is on your SSD then it will just use that if it goes over. Or just get the 16 Gb

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/power_user


Also. forcing your PC to the point where using pagefile is critical when it comes to an SSD can really have a detrimental effect on the SSD as all the writes that pagefile makes from file swapping will eat away at the NAND.

Why do you run 16GB on Delta when you can run 4GB and just make use of page/swap file? Its a silly question is it not?

 

[Pill Monster]

16GB would be an improvement but I think it's rather miniscule. If you have plan to upgrade to Skylake, better stay with 8GB for a while.
I don't really believe RAM usage reading. It seems like apps/games will allocate RAM as much as they can not as they need.

That's because Task Manager only tells half the story. In W7 it shows working set; WS is data currently being processed by the CPU. It's a small portion of the total in use.
W8.1 and 10 at least display Committed Amount which is a step up, but to see the real picture you need an app like Process Explorer and have some idea what you're looking at.



Far Cry 4 in W8.1 with a GTX980 SLI will hit 16GB easily.
On systems with 16GB installed and no PF the game will CTD from low memory. Same applies to GTAV, Watchdogs and plenty of others.

This topic used to come up frequently at Guru3D.
Seemed every time an OS was released. or new GPU with a crapton of VRAM, or DX11 game, or API, threads would appear claiming xxx game had "Massive Memory Leak causing CTD", or similar.

A lot of them run with no pagefile so yeah that didn't help either...



I did post quite a lot of in-game screenshots with Process Explorer, Task Manger, and GPU-z etc along with (very badly drawn) diagrams attempting to break things down.
have screenshots if anyone wants to see, but I think they're hosted on an old PB account. I can prob Google them tho..



I'm waiting to see how W10 pans out to see if the memory footprint is going to be a bit smaller. The main culprit in W8 was no control over how much RAM was mapped into GPU address space.
MS had planned to fix this in 8.1 with WDDM 1.3 but didn't, and it became part of the WDDM 2.0 package. That's the dynamic resources part of W10.

 

[Jetster]

Okay yea get 16

 

[micropage7]

my computer im currently using has 12gb ram and that was it came with when I bought it.

amazing