8GB vs 16GB for Gaming

the unreal tech 4 demo used a machine with 16gb. that is epics standard work box for workers. I know that for fact since where i do contract work is owned by epic games and all workstations they put out on the floor are at least 16gb or more.

new games might take more that was just a tech demo. the unreal engine 4 can take up as much ram as the people who make the game want to if they want to use big ass stuff they can. some of the not optimized stuff eats through 16gb like candy.

get 16 if you want to play with the same machine well into the unreal engine 4 days. I use 64gb ram has been cheep as hell for a while anyway it is not that much to install a large amount of ram that is as much as the machine holds and i will never have to bother adding more until i get rid of it.


Oh and epic games does not make tech demos....making that stuff takes to long it will be used for something somewhere.

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ochadd said:
More memory is better. I've been known to play Mass Effect 3, Planetside 2, and Skyrim in the same night depending on what friends are online. Windows will cache allot of this and definitely could use more than 8GB when you consider reserve.

I just upgraded from 8 to 24GB yesterday because I needed to scratch the itch. This is [H] after all.
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This might be [H], but it's not a reason to spend money stupidly. I hate it when people try to use that as a justification to spend more money.

True [H] is overclocking to the limits, pushing the hardware you already have to perform at the top of its capabilities.
 
Tsumi said:
This might be [H], but it's not a reason to spend money stupidly. I hate it when people try to use that as a justification to spend more money.

True [H] is overclocking to the limits, pushing the hardware you already have to perform at the top of its capabilities.
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If it was pure excess I'd agree with you but 16GB is not unreasonable. I'd argue it's a little short of perfect for diversified gamers. My machine has around 6.5GB free out of 24GB. The following situation uses 17.5GB of memory including In Use and Standby:
- Windows 7 Ultimate
- Steam
- Origin
- ME3 multiplayer running and minimized. Planetside 2 and Skyrim opened and closed previously.
- Chrome in three tabs. Hardforum, iGoogle, and CNN.
- Logitech mouse software
- Corsair keyboard macro software
- Security Essentials
- Dropbox
- Coretemp and Coretemp widget
- Weather widget
- AMD control panel in system tray.
- 4 sticky notes
- OpenOffice excel opened and closed (added in edit)

I'm at work now but I'll try to remember to take a screenshot this weekend for proof. Throw in Secunia, Windows Update, maybe a defrag, virus scan, Picasa, Acrobat reader, music player, maybe Teamviewer and I'll bet that left over pool would be considerably smaller. 16GB may seem like excess but it is useful. Now if someone asked me if 24+GB was useful I'd say no unless there is a specific memory intensive taks they were looking to do.

memory_usage.JPG
 
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Dropping $80 on a good set of 16GB DDR3-1600 is not excessive.

Dropping $300+ on a set of 16GB DDR3-2400+ is excessive.
 
atp1916 said:
Dropping $80 on a good set of 16GB DDR3-1600 is not excessive.

Dropping $300+ on a set of 16GB DDR3-2400+ is excessive.
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but with the 2400, you will get a fps more in a game!(maybe)

I agree on both sides, if you have the extra money, why not. I use it also as a backup, incase I get another computer or some ram goes bad. I got 8 stocks of the samsung lo profile 4gb sticks and love them.
8gb is just fine though too.
 
Let's see what I'm doing with 8gb of RAM, with ~7gb max usage:

1gb RAMDisk for internet caching
Teamviewer
Bitdefender 2013
Windows 8 Professional
Steam
Origin
Uplay
6+ tabs firefox, 2-3 with flash content
LoL client
Starcraft II
Internet Explorer
Roccat Kone+ software
Saitek Cyborg V7 software
Windows Media Player
Windows 8 Gadget Pack- CPU meter, Coretemp, two GPU monitors, weather
nVidia control panel

Sure, extra room for caching/prefetch is nice, but unnecessary, especially with an SSD. $40 is often more than halfway between a 120gb SSD and 240gb SSD, which would be more beneficial for a gamer?

Also, tests have shown that faster memory only increases FPS in massive RTS games. It doesn't really show benefits in any other game genre.
 
Anything over 8GB for gaming is (at this point) relatively useless, OP.

No, it would not be worth your $$$ spent as you don't appear to be a heavy multi-tasker.
 
Yeah, as people have been saying, 8gb is perfecly fine for gaming and will be for some time. get a nice c8 1600mhz kit and you'll be solid for a while. There is absolutely NO performance increase, the extra ram will just sit there, begging for a home with an owner who will actually use it.
 
Indeed, till you start playing around with VM's though, but that isn't gaming so yeh.
 
The only way I get over 8gb usage is to run several virtual machines at once. You can log your ram usage while gaming to see where your at. I seriously doubt that your are close to maxing the 8gb.
 
One more to chime in here, for gaming 8GB of RAM is fine, most of the time I'm only at 4-5GB and I leave a bunch of stuff open.
 
Shadohh said:
Its not about the game itself its about the total experience.... how many apps you want to leave open while you game.

So with 16gb of ram you could leave open your Photoshop work/ 200 tabs in chrome and still play Planetsiege and be able to freely tab between them without disk caching.

Its all in how you use the computer. Just keep that in mind.
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qft; while im gaming i got music/stream/webpages(20+tabs)/torrent and other apps going off. just upgraded from 8->12 and although i didnt use more than 5; it was just nice knowing i can keep all them tabs open. as others have said keeping an option for ramdisk is nice for those still not on ssd
 
8GB is perfectly fine for gaming. If you don't have an SSD though, 16gb would help because you can disable your page file. Doing that would drastically decrease loading times on large games. I have shown many people that and it makes a more than noticeable difference.
 
I'm currently running 8GB of RAM, GF has a virtually identical system with 16GB of RAM. 3770ks, gtx680s, etc.

She rarely if ever breaks 8GB usage, even with her work stuff + games running. I never have an issue with 8GB. There are 0% differences in our gaming performance. In truth, my 8GB setup edges her 16GB out by <1% on load times because I have a few less programs running.

If you have need for more than 8GB RAM, you'll know. And it's the easiest upgrade you can do. Save money now, upgrade if you get close to breaking 8GB imo. I'm glad I did...would have been 40-60 bucks wasted for my current needs.
 
Why even bother asking? With 8GBx2 sets going for so cheap, no reason not to go 16GB and let the OS sort it out.
 
I bought a 4x4 set to anger the internet. but seriously, if it isn't going into your own pc, why would you get angry about it?


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8gb is more than enough at this point in time for just straight gaming. There really isn't any advantage to having more than that right now unless you are doing audio and video editing, or utilizing a ramdisk setup.
 
leojobslee said:
Yeah, but if you need to install several games in your phone meanwhile, it is recommended to extend your memory. I don't believe you guys won't listen to songs and watch movies on your phone.
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Did you even read the thread at all? The OP is not talking about flash memory, expandable storage or anything related to phones.
 
The price on RAM is so cheap, go ahead and do it. :eek:

I went from 8GB to 16GB recently (back in Jan.) and I have not noticed a single iota of performance increase when gaming. Haven't really had a chance to put Photoshop through it's paces yet either.

With that being said, I got my 16GB kit for like $65, then sold my 8GB kit for like $20 after shipping so I got like $45 in my 16GB kit.

It's cheap.
Wont hurt performance.
Software/games use more and more RAM, not less and less.
 
I use Photoshop and Illustrator a lot, and currently have 8gb RAM. Should I upgrade to 16GB cos I feel that there's a slight "pause" sometimes in the middle of several tabs in PS open..
 
jmcp10 said:
I use Photoshop and Illustrator a lot, and currently have 8gb RAM. Should I upgrade to 16GB cos I feel that there's a slight "pause" sometimes in the middle of several tabs in PS open..
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I use the same programs a lot and I don't run into issues with 8GB.
If I use the 64-bit version usage went to 6.5GB, 32-bit less than 4GB.
 
I personally love having 16GB of speedy ram (2133)...I have my pagefile disabled (despite having a speedy SSD)..I am currently using ~4GB on a 4 hr out reboot running:

1. FF with 10 tabs open
2. F@H (1 SMP client, 1 GPU client)
3. utorrent (1GB dedicated cache to prevent disk overloads)
4. Steam
5. Afterburner
6. Various background programs (THX, MSE etc)

I have used a much as 9-10GB during gaming sessions..My reasoning behind 16GB was that I wanted to be able to run everything I do without having to bother closing things, and to also play around with a ~4GB RamDisk at some point..
 
Not worth it. 8 is just fine. RAM sizes climb so fast these days and overkill really isn't necessary.
 
Just came from a 8gb ddr2 setup to a 16gb ddr3 setup and hey i love it.:) go for it
 
DDR3 8GB is more than enough. I have 16GB right now. I only use about 5 to 6 at most. SO. yeah. stay with 8
 
Use 16GB kit in 2 of my rigs, Rest are running on 8GB kits except my vmware server, in which I use 32GB.
 
I've personally never used more than 6GB at any one time. With my current build I decided to go with 16GB just because I could, and it really wasn't expensive at all.

With the PS4 having 8GB and running an x64 platform, you may see games in the next few years actually being able to use more RAM than ever before. True, the PS4's 8GB is shared memory so games will have access to probably 6GB. Looking on the PC side, that difference should take into account "most" of the overhead of the OS... but what about vent/skype, FireFox/Chrome, Winamp/Foobar2k, etc also running...

I believe 8GB is perfectly fine for games of today and should do fine "tomorrow" but as bjornb17 pointed out, some level of future-proofing is possible if you plan on keeping your system for a few years and don't necessarily plan to upgrade it much during that time.
 
Like someone said, excess RAM is not wasted, the OS will use it as a disk cache, speeding up common tasks. Even an SSD is thousands of times slower than RAM. If you can spare the money, I would go for bigger RAM.
 
devil22 said:
Like someone said, excess RAM is not wasted, the OS will use it as a disk cache, speeding up common tasks. Even an SSD is thousands of times slower than RAM. If you can spare the money, I would go for bigger RAM.
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To do that user hav to explicitly set enable RAM caching, through software.
 
I've got 8 gigs in my system and the only bottle-neck I've found with games is my CPU and/or graphics cards. Instead of going with a large quantity of RAM I just chose 8gbs of very low latency sticks.
 
ccityinstaller said:
I personally love having 16GB of speedy ram (2133)...I have my pagefile disabled (despite having a speedy SSD)..I am currently using ~4GB on a 4 hr out reboot running:

1. FF with 10 tabs open
2. F@H (1 SMP client, 1 GPU client)
3. utorrent (1GB dedicated cache to prevent disk overloads)
4. Steam
5. Afterburner
6. Various background programs (THX, MSE etc)

I have used a much as 9-10GB during gaming sessions..My reasoning behind 16GB was that I wanted to be able to run everything I do without having to bother closing things, and to also play around with a ~4GB RamDisk at some point..
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How do you dedicate that 1GB to cache in Utorrent if you don't mind?
 
devil22 said:
Like someone said, excess RAM is not wasted, the OS will use it as a disk cache, speeding up common tasks. Even an SSD is thousands of times slower than RAM. If you can spare the money, I would go for bigger RAM.
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It's thousands of times slower, but will a human actually notice the difference between 0.1ms and 0.0001 ms access times?
 
d6bmg said:
To do that user hav to explicitly set enable RAM caching, through software.
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No, Windows automatically caches. Look up 'superfetch', and even without superfetch windows will cache recently used items just not in an as intelligent manner.

Tsumi said:
It's thousands of times slower, but will a human actually notice the difference between 0.1ms and 0.0001 ms access times?
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I think so. I mean if you're talking about reading a 4K text file, then no. But these times multiply for reading large amounts of data. For instance, in BF3, my map switch takes about 20 seconds from SSD, but if the server reloads the same level, the system loads it from RAM instead and it loads up in about 2 seconds. Just saying, it can be useful, it's not totally wasted, now whether that's worth the money is user dependent.
 
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devil22 said:
No, Windows automatically caches. Look up 'superfetch', and even without superfetch windows will cache recently used items just not in an as intelligent manner.



I think so. I mean if you're talking about reading a 4K text file, then no. But these times multiply for reading large amounts of data. For instance, in BF3, my map switch takes about 20 seconds from SSD, but if the server reloads the same level, the system loads it from RAM instead and it loads up in about 2 seconds. Just saying, it can be useful, it's not totally wasted, now whether that's worth the money is user dependent.
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Caching for utorrent has nothing to do with superfetch. There's a setting in Utorrent to allow you to specify an amount of RAM specifically for holding downloaded torrent data before it's written to disk. If you leave it set to the default of 32 MB and have a fast connection, it will quickly start having issues with waiting for disk access. I have mine bumped up to 512 MB and my disk thrashing issues went away when downloading.
 
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