RAM for gaming

[Paddi01]

Will 8gb of ram be enough for the next years for 1080p gaming?

It makes me wonder why some modern games recommend 16gb ram in system requirements but in reality only need 4-7.

[Mira Yurizaki]

The game itself may need 4-7 GB, but you also have to take into account what else you're doing on the machine. If the game takes up 7GB, then performance may suffer because everything else needs to fit on 1GB of RAM.

 

Also resolution has no bearing on how much RAM you need.

[Spoonmice]

I personally use 16gb of ram in my system and from it have learned that 8 is the BARE minimum, 12gb of ram is the best idea if you want to run a new game and have a few other programs running like, playing gta 5, and having a music app, discord and a temp monitor running 

[vanished]

Most peoples' systems idle at 2 - 4 GB used already (some much higher... ) so throw a game that needs another 6+ on top of that and you can quickly hit or exceed 8 GB, and unless you've got a large amount of stuff that could be swapped to disk without impacting performance, this will cause your game and the system overall to grind to a halt.

[TheGlenlivet]

Flight sims, full 3d games (IE Space simulation etc) can use more than 8 routinely.  I've seen 27 GB used in Xplane 11 with customer scenery, plane and weather once.  The system held about 25 FPS, but did not like it...

[Mira Yurizaki]

31 minutes ago, Ryan_Vickers said:

Most peoples' systems idle at 2 - 4 GB used already (some much higher... ) so throw a game that needs another 6+ on top of that and you can quickly hit or exceed 8 GB, and unless you've got a large amount of stuff that could be swapped to disk without impacting performance, this will cause your game and the system overall to grind to a halt.

I want to interject here (woo) that the idle RAM amount depends on the system RAM available. When I had my Windows 10 tablet with 2GB of RAM, it managed to get down to 350MB of RAM at idle.

 

I think a generalization is that Windows will idle at around 15%-20%. Assuming of course, minimal RAM hogs like that awesome RGB lighting controller you have. Or five because nobody can come up with a standard.

[vanished]

Just now, M.Yurizaki said:

I want to interject here (woo) that the idle RAM amount depends on the system RAM available. When I had my Windows 10 tablet with 2GB of RAM, it managed to get down to 350MB of RAM at idle.

 

I think a generalization is that Windows will idle at around 15%-20%. Assuming of course, minimal RAM hogs like that awesome RGB lighting controller you have. Or five because nobody can come up with a standard.

Yeah, I think that is probably more accurate.  I know we had a machine with 4GB of ram that would usually sit at nearly 2 GB used at idle, but after removing half the RAM it managed to trim itself down to about 1 GB

And I know my system with 32 GB of RAM idles in the 6 - 7 region most days.

 

What I don't understand is why this happens.  If it can get by on 1 GB, shouldn't it do that regardless?  Why would it take more just because there's room?  And yes I know the obvious answer is "it will cache things it can" and yes, using almost all free RAM for that makes sense since there's basically no downside (it will get out of the way when a program needs it) and yet it can improve loading times, but that's not what I'm talking about here.  I mean the actual "used" amount.  This is something that has baffled me for a long time and trying to find an answer online has yielded people confused in a variety of ways but no actual answer.

[Mira Yurizaki]

3 minutes ago, Ryan_Vickers said:

Yeah, I think that is probably more accurate.  I know we had a machine with 4GB of ram that would usually sit at nearly 2 GB used at idle, but after removing half the RAM it managed to trim itself down to about 1 GB

And I know my system with 32 GB of RAM idles in the 6 - 7 region most days.

 

What I don't understand is why this happens.  If it can get by on 1 GB, shouldn't it do that regardless?  Why would it take more just because there's room?  And yes I know the obvious answer is "it will cache things it can" and yes, using almost all free RAM for that makes sense since there's basically no downside (it will get out of the way when a program needs it) and yet it can improve loading times, but that's not what I'm talking about here.  I mean the actual "used" amount.  This is something that has baffled me for a long time and trying to find an answer online has yielded people confused in a variety of ways but no actual answer.

Part of it is most likely the memory management table.

 

The other is probably "because it can."

[vanished]

1 minute ago, M.Yurizaki said:

Part of it is most likely the memory management table.

 

The other is probably "because it can."

But it doesn't make sense... just because there's more room, doesn't mean it should take more, and doesn't even mean it can take more.  I mean, it only has so much that it actually needs to function.  There's no way it could just decide to take more if it wanted to other than just reserving it for no reason.

 

It's like "this movie normally takes up 20 GB, but your HDD is huge so we're gonna pad it to take 50 because there's room"

[MiniSchnazer]

I have 12 now. If you play Fallout without mods, 4k texture mods from Nexus, than 8 is enough, but if you add mods, edit inis like I did, than yeah, 12 is better. And I have 8 GB of VRAM. Alt+Tab to Opera is better too. More RAM can not fix everything but it helps. It depends what games are you playing, or are you using mods... 

[Mira Yurizaki]

54 minutes ago, Ryan_Vickers said:

But it doesn't make sense... just because there's more room, doesn't mean it should take more, and doesn't even mean it can take more.  I mean, it only has so much that it actually needs to function.  There's no way it could just decide to take more if it wanted to other than just reserving it for no reason.

Actually it might all just be from memory management tables. I found this: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/16323890/calculating-page-table-size and one of the posts noted "So yes, each process would require at least 4MB of memory to run, in increments of 4MB." And I found this: https://superuser.com/questions/782855/why-does-my-page-table-take-up-so-much-memory

 

But Windows 10 doesn't seem naive enough to create a page table of the entire virtual memory address range per process. Otherwise every page table would take up an ungodly amount of RAM. Though it may have been doing something like that before, considering that the maximum RAM Windows 7 supported was 192GB and starting in Windows 8 it bumped up to 2TB.

 

See:

• http://blogs.microsoft.co.il/sasha/2016/01/05/windows-process-memory-usage-demystified/
• https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20160701-00/?p=93785
• https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20160318-00/?p=93181

And the 350 MB usage on a 2GB of RAM tablet was running 32-bit Windows, this would heavily contribute to the minimal RAM usage.

[Mira Yurizaki]

In a funny note, while Windows 9x could address 2GB of RAM, there was an issue with the memory management system such that if you installed more than 512MB of RAM, the OS would "run out of memory" due to some caching system taking up more memory than the amount of memory space reserved for the system itself.

 

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/253912/-out-of-memory-error-messages-with-large-amounts-of-ram-installed

[vanished]

23 minutes ago, M.Yurizaki said:

Actually it might all just be from memory management tables. I found this: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/16323890/calculating-page-table-size and one of the posts noted "So yes, each process would require at least 4MB of memory to run, in increments of 4MB." And I found this: https://superuser.com/questions/782855/why-does-my-page-table-take-up-so-much-memory

 

But Windows 10 doesn't seem naive enough to create a page table of the entire virtual memory address range per process. Otherwise every page table would take up an ungodly amount of RAM. Though it may have been doing something like that before, considering that the maximum RAM Windows 7 supported was 192GB and starting in Windows 8 it bumped up to 2TB.

 

See:

• http://blogs.microsoft.co.il/sasha/2016/01/05/windows-process-memory-usage-demystified/
• https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20160701-00/?p=93785
• https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20160318-00/?p=93181

And the 350 MB usage on a 2GB of RAM tablet was running 32-bit Windows, this would heavily contribute to the minimal RAM usage.

So basically the answer is Windows has a memory leak...?  I would say this seems reasonable based on behaviour I've seen in the past, but this only explains high usage that develops over a large uptime, not high usage (or varying amounts of usage depending on installed system RAM) that occurs right after a fresh boot.

[Mira Yurizaki]

5 minutes ago, Ryan_Vickers said:

So basically the answer is Windows has a memory leak...?  I would say this seems reasonable based on behaviour I've seen in the past, but this only explains high usage that develops over a large uptime, not high usage (or varying amounts of usage depending on installed system RAM) that occurs right after a fresh boot.

I'm only saying that if you have more RAM, Windows may use more of it on idle because of the page table size requirements. And it's likely not a problem unique to Windows.

[vanished]

7 minutes ago, M.Yurizaki said:

I'm only saying that if you have more RAM, Windows may use more of it on idle because of the page table size requirements. And it's likely not a problem unique to Windows.

So it takes more RAM to keep track of the RAM if you have more of it? Actually that makes sense, I could see that being a thing.  Still funny though

 

As for other OSes, I should try to do some experiments.  I'm not sure I share your confidence that this is as common of a behaviour as you think.

[Mira Yurizaki]

1 minute ago, Ryan_Vickers said:

So it takes more RAM to keep track of the RAM if you have more of it? Actually that makes sense, I could see that being a thing.  Still funny though

 

As for other OSes, I should try to do some experiments.  I'm not sure I share your confidence that this is as common of a behaviour as you think.

It has to. Every modern OS uses a virtual memory system involving page tables. That data has to live somewhere. What strategy they use however is another story. And like all other engineering decisions, there's no single "best" one.

[vanished]

34 minutes ago, M.Yurizaki said:

It has to. Every modern OS uses a virtual memory system involving page tables. That data has to live somewhere. What strategy they use however is another story. And like all other engineering decisions, there's no single "best" one.

My strategy, if I can be bothered to try this, would be to boot my machine to both Windows and Linux as it currently stands (with 32 GB of RAM installed), and then try it again with 3/4 of the sticks removed so it has just 8 GB and observe the difference (if any).

[Nena Trinity]

16gb at 2666mhz or higher should be enough.

[MrAlbertrocks]

On 12/8/2017 at 4:23 AM, Nena360 said:

16gb at 2666mhz or higher should be enough.

What about 2133mhz? Is there a big difference? 

[Nena Trinity]

5 hours ago, MrAlbertrocks said:

What about 2133mhz? Is there a big difference? 

Well if you pair it with Ryzen it may be! O3O