Does ram affect GPU or PC performance?

[Blazepoint5]

It might be a placebo effect or not.

On a GPU box i saw that there is ram recommendations like minimum is 4gb and recommended is 8? What does that mean? Does textures and other gpu stuff go from

 

Storage>ram>cpu>ram>gpu or

Storage>ram>cpu>gpu

 

Why is the ram thing there.

[Blasty Blosty]

General pc performance will be slowed due to a lack of ram, they are right in saying 8 is the minimum, 4 is too little these days. At some point there will be a diminishing return with increased capacity.

[rcmaehl]

7 minutes ago, Blazepoint5 said:

It might be a placebo effect or not.

On a GPU box i saw that there is ram recommendations like minimum is 4gb and recommended is 8? What does that mean? Does textures and other gpu stuff go from

storage>ram>gpu? Or 

Storage>gpu? 

 

Why is the ram thing there.

Unless you have an extremely new NVidia GPU with DirectStorage compatiblity running on Windows 11 you will see performance losses due to a slow CPU and RAM when loading textures and other assets. These shouldn't be anything major, but it's not nonexistant.

[Hellowpplz]

11 minutes ago, Blazepoint5 said:

It might be a placebo effect or not.

On a GPU box i saw that there is ram recommendations like minimum is 4gb and recommended is 8? What does that mean? Does textures and other gpu stuff go from

storage>ram>gpu? Or 

Storage>gpu? 

 

Why is the ram thing there.

storage
cpu>ram>gpu

[Alex Atkin UK]

7 minutes ago, rcmaehl said:

Unless you have an extremely new NVidia GPU with DirectStorage compatiblity running on Windows 11 you will see performance losses due to a slow CPU and RAM when loading textures and other assets. These shouldn't be anything major, but it's not nonexistant.

DirectStorage wont fix a lack of RAM.  At best it might help a lack of VRAM not system RAM, if they optimise the game to keep as few assets in VRAM at a time as possible due to being able to load them faster.

[YoungBlade]

Reducing system RAM can also hinder GPU performance, not just from the perspective of hurting CPU performance (which is the main issue) but also in not leaving enough memory if you spill over your VRAM buffer. Having that happen causes data in RAM to need to be swapped into storage, which will cause stuttering.

 

Here's an ancient Hardware Unboxed video where Steve took a look at how much system RAM was needed in 2017. The reason it's relevant is because he also tested different VRAM capacities - unfortunately, he used the 3GB and 6GB GTX 1060 cards, so they don't only vary in VRAM capacity, but you can still see within a card's performance with different RAM amounts that having less system RAM hurts more the less VRAM you have - especially when it comes to the 1% and 0.1% lows.

 

In other words, having less system RAM when you also don't have enough VRAM will exacerbate the stuttering issues.

[Blazepoint5]

15 minutes ago, Hellowpplz said:

storage
cpu>ram>gpu

Right its cpu ram gpu

 

Storage>ram>cpu>ram>gpu or

Storage>ram>cpu>gpu

[Somerandomtechyboi]

25 minutes ago, Blazepoint5 said:

It might be a placebo effect or not.

On a GPU box i saw that there is ram recommendations like minimum is 4gb and recommended is 8? What does that mean? Does textures and other gpu stuff go from

storage>ram>gpu? Or 

Storage>gpu? 

 

Why is the ram thing there.

what gpu?

id just ignore that since nowadays if you arent building an office pc (which you shouldnt be and you are better off buying old used <100$ prebuilts and chucking ssds in em) 16gb is basically minimum with 32gb preffered

 

24 minutes ago, Blasty Blosty said:

General pc performance will be slowed due to a lack of ram

due to using virtual ram aka swap file which is basically just using your storage as ram, even a gen5 ssd is still much slower than ram, afaik those are only abit faster than ddr2 r/w wise but im comparing to my xtreem dark 1066c6 1x3 at 1470 7-9-9-10 trfc 80 which iirc was around the 10k mark r/w but its been awhile and one of the sticks decided to shelf die on me, think slower 800-1000mhz ddr2 will be abit slower but it helps that its usually quad rank for 8gb and not a cursed dual rank + single rank 3gb config

 

2 minutes ago, YoungBlade said:

Reducing system RAM can also hinder GPU performance, not just from the perspective of hurting CPU performance (which is the main issue) but also in not leaving enough memory if you spill over your VRAM buffer. Having that happen causes data in RAM to need to be swapped into storage, which will cause stuttering.

also this

forgot the gpu can use system ram if vram is exceeded

 

tldr need enough ram so stuff doesnt spill over to virtual memory aka your ssd

[Blazepoint5]

29 minutes ago, YoungBlade said:

but also in not leaving enough memory if you spill over your VRAM buffer. Having that happen causes data in RAM to need to be swapped into storage, which will cause stuttering.

I agree because my game stautters af i want to put 8gigs and see

[mariushm]

The RAM is not used only by the game. It's also used by the operating system and other programs you may have running in background (browsers, discord, other things).

 

Yes, ram amount matters. 

Running in dual channel (2 sticks) also improves performance, up to 5-10% extra performance in some situations. 

 

Some processors are more sensitive about frequency : for example, there's a noticeable performance increase on Ryzen processors going from 2666 Mhz to 3000 Mhz and 3200 Mhz and a bit less noticeable from 3200 to 3600 or more. Intel processors used to be less sensitive about frequency.

 

 

 

[OddOod]

49 minutes ago, Blazepoint5 said:

Storage>ram>cpu>gpu

Usually it goes
Storage > Chipset (as even NVMe drives tend to not have direct attachment to CPU) > CPU/RAM (there will be a lot of back and forth as the textures and stuff are unpacked) > GPU (often directly wired to CPU)
There are cases where the GPU's VRAM is full and it will try offloading some cache to RAM (which is routed through the CPU), but the latency on that is absurd and can lead to instabilities