Basic Requirement for RAM

[potato_curry]

I have 4 GB of RAM on my pc. I'm a tech noob so i was wondering what exactly could be the drawbacks of gaming with 4 GB RAM. In layman's terms, please.
I play games like The Witcher 3 (minimum req 6GB) and Dark Souls 3 (minimum req 8GB), on my pc which has 4GB RAM.
Will it cause any issues?

[DarkRift5]

What are your other components (CPU, GPU)? Your PC might get bottlenecked by those first.

4GB is a little low, I'd look into getting up to 8GB if the rest of your system is up to snuff.

[1Reshiram12]

As long as you turn every application off that isn't required to run windows or the game, you should be able to get by.  A lot of people think that 8 GB is a must have, and it's nice to have but tests have shown it doesn't impact the game much.

[iRileyx]

Might be a problem for some games and cause them to crash if they're using too much, I find GTA V can sometimes be using 9/10GB of my ram

[Moress]

Ram is a bit of an all or nothing component. You'll be well aware if you're running into Ram issues because the game will stutter very noticeably. My brother has 6 gigs right now and hasn't seen any issues in his games. But you may start seeing issues with 4 gigs.

[potato_curry]

41 minutes ago, DarkRift5 said:

What are your other components (CPU, GPU)? Your PC might get bottlenecked by those first.

4GB is a little low, I'd look into getting up to 8GB if the rest of your system is up to snuff.

intel i5 4440 3.1GHz
GTX970 4GB
RAM 4GB
 

[Moress]

Just now, potato_curry said:

intel i5 4440 3.1GHz
GTX970 4GB
RAM 4GB
 

Yes pick up another 4gb stick of DDR3. Its really cheap these days.

[potato_curry]

10 minutes ago, Moress said:

Ram is a bit of an all or nothing component. You'll be well aware if you're running into Ram issues because the game will stutter very noticeably. My brother has 6 gigs right now and hasn't seen any issues in his games. But you may start seeing issues with 4 gigs.

i guess i have noticed this, when playing the witcher 3, frames drop to around 50 (for about a second or so) and hop back up to 60.
With Dark Souls 3, it drops (again for about a few seconds) to 52 or 56 fps and then hops back to 60

 

[Moress]

1 minute ago, potato_curry said:

i guess i have noticed this, when playing the witcher 3, frames drop to around 50 (for about a second or so) and hop back up to 60.
With Dark Souls 3, it drops (again for about a few seconds) to 52 or 56 fps and then hops back to 60

 

Those aren't the stutters ram will cause, Ram based stutters will be down to 4-5 fps for a second when the ram is full the the system switches to caching on a SSD or HDD.

[LogicalDrm]

10 hours ago, potato_curry said:

i guess i have noticed this, when playing the witcher 3, frames drop to around 50 (for about a second or so) and hop back up to 60.
With Dark Souls 3, it drops (again for about a few seconds) to 52 or 56 fps and then hops back to 60

 

Thats normal for games. Whenever something more intensive happens and your hardware can't keep up, you see frames dropping. However, those drops aren't anything major. Do you even notice them while playing? Maxing out RAM would be small stuttering all the time while FPS would remain same. I had this issue when playing with 4gb on BF3.