Is 8Gb of RAM enough for all games?

Domini said:
When did that price ever exist?
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WorldExclusive said:
$42-45 for 8GB was the lowest I've seen.

But now, I wouldn't buy anything less than 8GB sticks.
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Do you guys know about deals forums? I think slickdeals and fatwallet are the biggest. WAY more traffic than the hot deals subforum here.

Anyways, it was sub $30 many times before about two years ago.


and those were decent common deals. I've gotten it like around $15 before.
 
The only game I have gotten to use even as much as 4 gigs (just for it's self) is Skyrim with the largest/bestest textures I could find.

Playing GW2 last night I barely hit 1.5 gb of ram (for the game) didnt even break 4 gb total ram use, didnt have anything else except task manager running though.
 
I've had 8gb since I built my comp in 2011, I've seen no reason to increase it since then.
 
My system is 8gb. 16gb doesn't show any difference at this point in time, but my next system will have 16gb for sure.

I don't plan on upgrading until intel's new architecture in 2015. No point. The new chips are barely faster clock for clock than my old 2500k.
 
I wish I had stocked up better on that Samsung Green RAM when it was on sale at Newegg maybe a year ago or something like that. 8GB of DDR3 1600 (2x4GB) was $30 or $35. Now it's selling for $90 or $100 used on ebay.
 
pgaster said:
I wish I had stocked up better on that Samsung Green RAM when it was on sale at Newegg maybe a year ago or something like that. 8GB of DDR3 1600 (2x4GB) was $30 or $35. Now it's selling for $90 or $100 used on ebay.
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Yea I picked up at least 3 kits of that stuff at the time and wish I had gotten more.
 
Short version, 8GB should be fine now, and for the near future. If you do web browsing with lots of tabs open, or have a bunch of programs open at a time, or have anything running in the background while you game, an upgrade to 16GB would be worth considering. I did notice my system felt like it ran smoother after upgrading, but it's nowhere near the improvement I got when upgrading from 4GB to 8GB.
 
Short is 6GB is fine for now and 8GB is prefered if your wallet can handle it.
 
I have 14 tabs open in chrome as well these applications + more running in the background.



And here's my usage:



I've considered buying other ram as an upgrade but, why? I've just found that for me, as of right now, there's no benefit.
 
Try running vmware with the following guest OS simultaneously: ubuntu, windows 7, windows xp, windows server 2012, centos 6.5
 
X58 setup I had 6 gb of 1600mhz with tri sli 470s and had to upgrade to 12gb because was running out of system ram and crashing. After upgrading I was hitting 7gb usage with only bf3 running. Think it's because win7 puts aside a matching amount of system ram for the amount of vram per gpu. So right off the hop I was losing nearly 4gb of vram to that.
 
Uhm I run win 7 Pro x64 with 6GB of Ram and Ive never had that issue even with BF4 running.
I have never touched the full 6GB people.
Do we need screenshots to become belibers?
 
dewbak75 said:
Short version, 8GB should be fine now, and for the near future. If you do web browsing with lots of tabs open, or have a bunch of programs open at a time, or have anything running in the background while you game, an upgrade to 16GB would be worth considering. I did notice my system felt like it ran smoother after upgrading, but it's nowhere near the improvement I got when upgrading from 4GB to 8GB.
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This +1. I do exactly that (the bolded part) and I'm sitting at around 7.25GB of RAM usage right now. That's before I launch my test VM and BF4.

Hence why I upgraded to 16GB of RAM long ago.
 
{NG}Fidel said:
Uhm I run win 7 Pro x64 with 6GB of Ram and Ive never had that issue even with BF4 running.
I have never touched the full 6GB people.
Do we need screenshots to become belibers?
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You have single gpu. All you took from my post was that I was running win7... You have plently of vram so it doesn't get used up. I was running 3 470s so windows tried to offload system ram as vram when I ran out of vram. Therefore system memory usage skyrockets.
 
skadebo said:
If you want facts instead of the broscience in this thread: http://www.techbuyersguru.com/Ramgaming2.php

TL;DR: Some latest games use more than 8GB of RAM.
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Judging by the graphs and the fact that the 4gb stick can't be run in dual channel (because it's a single stick), it seems there's not much difference at all between 4, 8, or 16. I think it could be said that 4gb is fine as long as you don't have a bunch of other memory intensive things running, in which case you're better off with 8gb+. I don't see why anyone would get less than 8gb anyway these days, it's cheap.
 
Armenius said:
Remember that your video card uses physical addressable memory equal to the size of its own memory. So in addition to the system memory the game is using there is also memory always reserved for the GPU. So if you have a 3GB video card and games nowadays are using 1-3 GB, you'll want to have at least 8GB of system memory with the worst-case scenario being 6GB of usage. 16GB is pretty much the sweet spot with Windows 7/8 because of the OS overhead of 2-4 GB and dual/quad channel memory controllers.
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whu? I think you're living in the past... This was something you had to take into account when working with 32 bit os's and their limitations.

With 64-bit Os's (which everyone who has a decent pc should have) this is no longer an issue.
 
skadebo said:
If you want facts instead of the broscience in this thread: http://www.techbuyersguru.com/Ramgaming2.php

TL;DR: Some latest games use more than 8GB of RAM.
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In BioShock, and only maybe:
Update: After many more runs of the Bioshock benchmark for subsequent articles, we've learned that the minimums are greatly affected by hard drive access times due to the frequent scene changes in this benchmark, and our 16GB system likely was impacted the least by this. We doubt the effect would be so pronounced in an actual gaming scenario where scene changes are less frequent.
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Hypothesizing, but no interest in experimentation to confirm. This, to you, is good science?
 
wonderfield said:
Hypothesizing, but no interest in experimentation to confirm. This, to you, is good science?
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AFAIK bioshock infinite uses a 32-bit exe so it will never use more than 4GB of ram on its own. I could be wrong, I don't have the game installed so I can't check. I don't think that I am though.


My guess is that they're using a flyover type timedemo like Heaven. Yes, minimums in those can be effected by HDD access. I guess that its possible that Windows is caching more data on a system with more ram when they run the timedemo a few times. Thats not going to effect you in game. Thats my guess.
 
killernerd said:
whu? I think you're living in the past... This was something you had to take into account when working with 32 bit os's and their limitations.

With 64-bit Os's (which everyone who has a decent pc should have) this is no longer an issue.
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Actually Armenius is right. Thats how it works. Windows puts aside an equal amount of memory for the amount of vram on the gpu.
 
It wouldn't be necessary to do that. Partitioning system memory was required in the AGP days (with AGP apertures) because memory linearization was a function of the motherboard chipset. That isn't the case with PCIe graphics.

Direct3D/OpenGL will totally allocate from the free store, but that's bog-standard DMA.
 
You have single gpu. All you took from my post was that I was running win7... You have plently of vram so it doesn't get used up. I was running 3 470s so windows tried to offload system ram as vram when I ran out of vram. Therefore system memory usage skyrockets.
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When it comes to upgrading my PC I tend to go to the components that need it the most. So lets say my GPU just does not have the ram needed I upgrade that as opposed to upgrading my system ram. System Ram as a Vram stand in is painful IMO.
 
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