Why do some people insist that 4GB is still enough for gaming?

[Tieox]

I'm on 8GB DDR4, but seriously considering 16GB as a primary upgrade for 2017.

[Taja]

Nobody says that. I never saw it, at least.

I tought you were talking about vram, and in that case 4Gb is enough (hell, even less if you are not graphics crazed).

For ram, i think 8Gb is the sweetspot. 

[ybriK]

1 hour ago, 2Buck said:

If you have the money to spend 350$+ building a rig, you can afford the extra ten bucks. Just saying.

Because you clearly have no perspective of the personal and financial situations those people are in. You just assume if you can spend X amount of stuff on Y item then you should be able to afford Z item.

 

You're only thinking about yourself.

[Apollo Refugio]

1 minute ago, ybriK said:

Because you clearly have no perspective of the personal and financial situations those people are in. You just assume if you can spend X amount of stuff on Y item then you should be able to afford Z item.

 

You're only thinking about yourself.

holy shayte things just got serious mate

[MMKing]

Where are all these people that claim 4GB is enough? or even more than enough as you put it.

[aisle9]

If your PC is a web surfer, email and YouTube box , 4GB will do . I have a laptop with 4GB for that exact purpose , and it works fine. 

 

If you intend to actually use your PC, 8 is the right number, higher in some cases. 

[JoeCoke]

1 hour ago, ybriK said:

Because you clearly have no perspective of the personal and financial situations those people are in. You just assume if you can spend X amount of stuff on Y item then you should be able to afford Z item.

 

You're only thinking about yourself.

That makes no sense at all. If you're blowing 350$+ on a gaming PC, you can afford that extra 10$. If you're soooo poor, or in a bad "financial situation", you wouldn't be frivolously spending money on a gaming PC in the first place. For instance, you're spending 400$ on a gaming PC. What makes 410$ so out of the question??? If your objective is to build a gaming PC, it makes no sense to spend 25$ on 4GB when for 35$ you can get 8GB. No, I'm not thinking about myself, I'm thinking about common sense.

 

35 minutes ago, MMKing said:

Where are all these people that claim 4GB is enough? or even more than enough as you put it.

Youtube comments, as I said in the OP. You can find these people in comments sections of build videos or really any PC gaming related videos. If you haven't seen it, then you probably haven't spent as much time as me in Youtube comments.   Recently the "issue" has come up again because of people saying consoles don't need more than 4GB in attempt to damage control the Nintendo Switch.

[lettuce head]

2 hours ago, Clanscorpia said:

Its more than 10 bucks mate, look at in in hours of work

even so, cutting costs elsewhere are more viable. Going to a smaller form factor like an matx case and mobo, sticking with a single ssd or hdd, locked cpu's and different chipsets on a mobo etc. If you have the money to put (at minimum) $400 USD to a pc, you can afford 8gb of ram.

[JoeCoke]

27 minutes ago, aisle9 said:

If your PC is a web surfer, email and YouTube box , 4GB will do . I have a laptop with 4GB for that exact purpose , and it works fine. 

 

If you intend to actually use your PC, 8 is the right number, higher in some cases. 

Exactly, 4GB is only good for basic use these days. Well, unless you're willing to only keep one or two tabs open and barely any other applications open, then you might be able to scrape by with 2GB for basic things. OSes, browsers and other applications will only get bigger, more bloated and un-optimized from here, pretty soon 4GB will be completely obsolete.

 

The only case I can think of where upgrading to 8GB on a gaming PC wouldn't be a good option is if you're building a scrap PC and ended up with a DDR2 motherboard (DDR2 2GB DIMMs are expensive and used memory isn't a great choice)..

[SLAYR]

49 minutes ago, 2Buck said:

Youtube comments, as I said in the OP. You can find these people in comments sections of build videos or really any PC gaming related videos. If you haven't seen it, then you probably haven't spent as much time as me in Youtube comments.   Recently the "issue" has come up again because of people saying consoles don't need more than 4GB in attempt to damage control the Nintendo Switch.

With the nintendo switch it could be perfectly fine with 4gb of ram, consoles really don't need that much ram because games are better optimized for them so lower ram would mean the games will be coded to use less ram, if you look at the ps3 it only had 256mb of ram for the gpu, and 256mb for the system when most pcs had at least 1Gb of ram in them.

[MMKing]

54 minutes ago, 2Buck said:

Youtube comments, as I said in the OP. You can find these people in comments sections of build videos or really any PC gaming related videos. If you haven't seen it, then you probably haven't spent as much time as me in Youtube comments.   Recently the "issue" has come up again because of people saying consoles don't need more than 4GB in attempt to damage control the Nintendo Switch.

You are 100% correct, i have not spent allot of time in Youtube comments. 

 

[Jovidah]

8 hours ago, 2Buck said:

This is about RAM, not VRAM.

Fair enough.

Ooooh my bad. Yeah 4 GB is hopeless. On my previous rig was 6 and it consistently filled up and had to swap from virtual memory. I currently have 16 and even that manages to fill up pretty darn quickly.

[DaMainMan]

9 hours ago, Clanscorpia said:

Dude, I live in canada, and DDR4 scales in price pretty linerally so to go from 8-16 is $80 for me and 4-8 is $40 or 4 hours of work

I really hope you are young/have just a simple part time job -> otherwise I would get a new job!

[Clanscorpia]

23 minutes ago, DaMainMan said:

I really hope you are young/have just a simple part time job -> otherwise I would get a new job!

Im 13 and get minimum wage and my grandpa butcher shop and work only 125ish hours a year so

[JoeCoke]

8 hours ago, SLAYR said:

With the nintendo switch it could be perfectly fine with 4gb of ram, consoles really don't need that much ram because games are better optimized for them so lower ram would mean the games will be coded to use less ram, if you look at the ps3 it only had 256mb of ram for the gpu, and 256mb for the system when most pcs had at least 1Gb of ram in them.

People said the same thing for the Wii U when it only had 2GB, and we all know how well that worked out...

[aisle9]

9 hours ago, 2Buck said:

Exactly, 4GB is only good for basic use these days. Well, unless you're willing to only keep one or two tabs open and barely any other applications open, then you might be able to scrape by with 2GB for basic things. OSes, browsers and other applications will only get bigger, more bloated and un-optimized from here, pretty soon 4GB will be completely obsolete.

 

The only case I can think of where upgrading to 8GB on a gaming PC wouldn't be a good option is if you're building a scrap PC and ended up with a DDR2 motherboard (DDR2 2GB DIMMs are expensive and used memory isn't a great choice)..

Windows 10 will eat up 2GB by itself . No , seriously. 

 

I picked up four 2GB DDR2-800 DIMMs used on Amazon for $36 not too long ago. passed MT86 and work like a charm. 

[smokefest]

4 GB for gaming ? You mean 4 gb for anything nowadays is not enough... actually its "border line" just for browsing...

I suggest 8 GB for any computer task, even if its just youtubing/facebook  because havin extra Ram is always good and 8 gb is cheap $$$

I suggest 16 GB for gaming as most of my games ( BF1, Tomb raider per exemple ) eat easily 6-7 GB of Ram only itself. Add another 1-2 gb for windows, couple application running in the background... it's easily using 8-9 GB of ram

 

having 16 GB give you some room for later, or to run more application at once.

 

I like to keep my BF1 open while I game in another game or youtube/fb and be able to ALT tab instantly all the time

[Jovidah]

2 hours ago, aisle9 said:

Windows 10 will eat up 2GB by itself . No , seriously. 

 

I picked up four 2GB DDR2-800 DIMMs used on Amazon for $36 not too long ago. passed MT86 and work like a charm. 

And not to forget browsers these days. Even Chrome has become a giant memory hog. It's not even funny anymore. A page of simple text will take several hundred megabytes.

[NUSNA_Moebius]

4 hours ago, 2Buck said:

People said the same thing for the Wii U when it only had 2GB, and we all know how well that worked out...

The Wii U's problems had less to do with the amount of memory, and more to do with the anemic CPU and GPU, which all revolved back to Nintendo's reliance on backwards compatibility.

[Carclis]

On 11/4/2016 at 1:45 PM, ybriK said:

Because you clearly have no perspective of the personal and financial situations those people are in. You just assume if you can spend X amount of stuff on Y item then you should be able to afford Z item.

 

You're only thinking about yourself.

If you don't have the money then cut back elsewhere. RAM is something that should never be skimped on because it can lead to an unbearable experience. In todays games 4 or 8 GB can mean the difference between a sometimes 60fps with frequent 5fps drops and just a constant 60fps.

 

2Buck saying that someone who has a $350 budget can afford to spend $10 more means that people should have the common sense and foresight to budget for a build that actually functions for it's intended purpose.

[Soundsystem90]

Good thread.

 

Low ram and wrong settings on ram can also cause premature CPU bottlenecking.

[kajoriEU]

8GB is the standard right now for Browsing/Office or casual gaming. Everyone who want's to serious play newest titles on his machine should upgrade their RAM to atleast 16 Gigs. (12 Gigs minimum, but not talking about dual/triplechannel-RAMSpeed problems with a 12 Gig config)

[smokefest]

On 04/11/2016 at 7:46 AM, Clanscorpia said:

Im 13 and get minimum wage and my grandpa butcher shop and work only 125ish hours a year so

Thats acutally really good at your age keep going and you will save more money

[smokefest]

1 hour ago, kajoriEU said:

8GB is the standard right now for Browsing/Office or casual gaming. Everyone who want's to serious play newest titles on his machine should upgrade their RAM to atleast 16 Gigs. (12 Gigs minimum, but not talking about dual/triplechannel-RAMSpeed problems with a 12 Gig config)

Yeah no wonder why a 2X 8 GB is a "no brainer" now. Just buy 2X8GB of any DDR3 or DDR4 and your set for a while sit back relax game and enjoy the alt tabing power

[Clanscorpia]

20 minutes ago, smokefest said:

Thats acutally really good at your age keep going and you will save more money

Ik its a family buisness. It got me my PC, bought everything in my setup myself except my aunts old monitor she didnt need anymore