However, it’s 2020, games are getting more demanding, and developers are making use of more and more RAM.Īs such, the minimum recommended amount of RAM found in gaming PCs will grow in time, though at the moment, most agree that 16 GB is the sweet spot: you won’t run out of RAM when gaming, and it’s future-proof. In today’s gaming landscape, anywhere between 8 GB to 16 GB is usually more than enough to run the majority of games comfortably. However, this could also include graphic designers or video editors who don’t want to shut down their RAM-hungry professional software every time they want to take a gaming break. This point is especially relevant for streamers who need to run multiple background programs for long periods. With that said, if you don’t want to close down all the other applications every time you start up a game, then having some extra RAM beyond the bare minimum would be worthwhile. Of course, this also includes the RAM used by the operating system itself, so it should always be accounted for as well. We are talking about streaming software, web browsers, recording software, and programs that may be running in the background (such as Steam, anti-viruses, and so on).
However, it’s not just games that use RAM, and that’s where the second factor comes in: the applications that will be running in the background while you’re gaming. If a game only ever uses a maximum of 4 GB of RAM, then having 8 GB of RAM means that the extra 4 GB will remain unused. The first one is how much RAM a particular game is programmed to use. Two factors dictate how high this threshold is and how it can fluctuate. Yet, there is only so much RAM you can add before it reaches a certain limit beyond which all the extra RAM will end up being unused. The game will have less memory to load data sets (game engine, textures, levels, lighting, and so on), resulting in a choppier gaming experience with some off-putting framerate drops. If a system has low RAM – let’s say 4 GB – then RAM will have a significant effect on game performance. The impact of RAM on gaming is a strange beast, and it is an extreme and disappointing tail-off.
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