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Will 32gb ram become the "recommended" going forward for pc owners?
- Thread starter Stacey
- Start date
It will increasingly over time methinks, but going much beyond 32GB for recommended seems unlikely.
Crossgen stuff will still mostly recommend 16 for the first year+ I would guess, and still work with 8.
Crossgen stuff will still mostly recommend 16 for the first year+ I would guess, and still work with 8.
It shouldn't. 16gb should even be fine still since the 16gb of ram is used by both the CPU and GPU on consoles.
Think it'll have to do with price range a lot, too. Currently, RAM is still rather cheap so if you do go with 32 GB over 16 GB (as I did with my last upgrade) it's not going to increase the build's overall cost much. But on a tight budget I'd still recommend 16 GB for the time being.
When people have 16 GB of system ram, they still have more ram than console owners. Consoles don't split ram between system and graphics core, that 16 gb is both system ram AND VRAM. PC GPUs typically have between 6 and 11 gb of VRAM separately these days. If you have 16 GB of system ram, and like a 1080ti, you have 27 GB of ram total, which will last you very long.
Now, splitting ram like this has perks and draw backs. The main perk is you naturally have more ram, the draw back is the obvious bottle neck between transfering from system ram to vram, and thus your CPU can't inspect or affect VRAM elements like textures, compiled shader binaries, etc. All things considered, if everything were equal in amount, I would actually say a unified memory structure is inherently superior, but given that PCs will have much more total ram than consoles, it becomes harder to say definitively. I would bet 16 gb system ram will be enough for the entirety of next generation.
That said, I have 128 GB of ram in my latest build, lol, so I'm good.
Now, splitting ram like this has perks and draw backs. The main perk is you naturally have more ram, the draw back is the obvious bottle neck between transfering from system ram to vram, and thus your CPU can't inspect or affect VRAM elements like textures, compiled shader binaries, etc. All things considered, if everything were equal in amount, I would actually say a unified memory structure is inherently superior, but given that PCs will have much more total ram than consoles, it becomes harder to say definitively. I would bet 16 gb system ram will be enough for the entirety of next generation.
That said, I have 128 GB of ram in my latest build, lol, so I'm good.
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Probably 10-15 years away before it 16 is the minimum, 32 is recommended, and even as we start to see this shift it will take another decade to become the norm..
Windows uses a ton more if you have more available. Just cause you see 13gb being used doesn't mean the game actually needs that.
Found a vid of 8gb vs 16gb on BFV and it seems to run pretty much the same: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=05cJW2zDPLU
How did you measure that? If there is more RAM available then actually needed that gets filled up first, before stuff that isn't needed in RAM get thrown out.
So it can look like the game needs more then it actually does, if you just look at how much RAM is used.
OP
OP
Is this also the case for vram?
Since upgrading my GPU I find more usage when playing the exact same games.
Afterburner. For both vram and ddr4
Weird, I mean it's not soon but you realize this is going to happen eventually right?
There are a lot of games that just allocate whatever VRAM they can as a cache even if it doesn't need it. I remember Call of Duty doing this around the crossgen period and people freaking out that it was taking up all of their 6GB cards despite running fine on 2GB cards.
Higher settings on games will take up more space in the GPU, as it has to hold larger buffers for the assets and framebuffers and such. Not so much system ram, because usually at worst all you hold in system ram is pointers to the locations of those items in vram.
EDIT: regarding graphics elements, I mean.
Yes, atleast if you refer to what Afterburner is showing. I think there are programs that accurately show actual VRAM usage though.
Resident Evil does this as well with its "8GB High textures", it's just the cache size the actual texture quality remains unaffected between 2GB and 8GB and so does the performance, it's only when you start going under that when you start noticing some sort of compression in far off textures.
By that point 32GB will cost roughly the same as 16GB does now.
RE2 chugs all it can get, think it's the only title I've seen to pass 10gb of my vram
No, 16 GB RAM is more, more than enough.
No game will ever fill the RAM pool anytime soon.
This dude speaks the truth.
16 GB is already more than enough
No game will ever fill the RAM pool anytime soon.
This dude speaks the truth.
16 GB is already more than enough
That's an idea some devs have for next-gen but it wouldn't really be possible on PCs simply due to the wide variance of hardware. It would require people to have exact types of SSDs devs used to make the game and ofc that is way too specific of a spec to have for games nowadays.
No. VRAM has a bandwidth of multiple terabytes per second. Even the fastest NVMEs have a bandwidth of merely several hundred GB/s, and on a PC, there is a huge bottle neck between sending data from system ram to VRAM.
The amount of RAM is more important for streaming data in a ring buffer than speed of transfer. Consoles get a slight boost because there is no transfer penalty due to a unified memory structure.
Isn't it getting quite cheap for 32GB? It will probably we quite common soon-ish, and I think DDR5 will be 16GB minimum per stick, so 32GB may be minimum there for a proper dual stick setup. Given the small increase of system RAM in this gen compared to last, might be quite easy to end up having way more RAM than consoles this gen.
You can get 16 GB DDR4 3200 mhz memory for like $60 these days.
Really consoles have a pool of Ram that is both system Ram and VRAM... Whereas pcs have separate pools..
I have 16gb of ram + 11gb of VRAM so a split pool total of 27gb..
16gb system ram for games is more than enough and will be for a bit yet I suspect
I have 16gb of ram + 11gb of VRAM so a split pool total of 27gb..
16gb system ram for games is more than enough and will be for a bit yet I suspect
Was just checking UK prices, where 32GB 3000Mhz is ~£130, 64GB is £300. Maybe the idea of lots of game data remaining in RAM will provide some advantage for PC later on?
I think so. Next winter i'll buy a new computer with 32gb ram (currently i've 16 Gb).
Anyway, consoles doesn't have typical PC Ram. PS4 have GDDR5, we have on PC DDR4.
DDR4 vs GDDR5:
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There's a relationship but they're definitely not the same thing. A given scene can only render things you've got in memory, but during traversal, if you have a low speed drive you may need to store things in memory up front because accessing them from storage would be too slow. With extremely fast / low latency storage, you can live closer to the wire (as in store fewer things that are not currently used), which can free up some space.
Inversely, in order to compensate for slow drive speed, it would be possible to increase system memory such that you can simply store many more things around you. It would have longer initial loads to fill this memory, but once in memory it's orders of magnitude faster to access compared to even the PS5 SSD. This solution is likely practical for many games, but it's definitely "possible" to design a scene which maximally stresses IO by feeding in more and more new data at extremely high speeds such that it is not practical to store in reasonable amounts of memory - although your assets still need to be stored on the drive, and that kind of thing would presumably stress the storage space limitations of games to a significant degree. I could see it being an issue in a massive open world game where you're allowed to zoom from one side of a (150GB+) game to another in very short order, for instance.
In the absence of high speed drives and excess memory, there are other things that might happen:
- Much worse draw distances so fewer assets are needed to be streamed in around you
- More severe LoD bias
- (Worst case scenario) significant pauses to load data, including load screens that don't exist on other platforms or with faster storage.
The latter can already happen in contemporary games - if you use glitches or exploits to fire yourself through the air very fast in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, the game will simply pause for 5+ seconds at a time while the game catches up. Sometimes it pauses multiple times on a single flight because of the speed.
The transfer from system ram to vram is one of the biggest bottle necks. More VRAM is actually preferable to more system ram. If you have the money to spend, buy a card with a lot of VRAM first.
As others have said, 16gb will be fine. GPU ram will probably matter more than system ram in the long run.
Yup, I got 16 gb 3200mhz for $70 about 3 months ago. Amazon actually sent me another set because the package was lost, but then the package showed up weeks later. I contacted them and they said I could keep it. Now I got 32gb hah.
I usually upgrade my RAM whenever the new "recommended" comes in. So when everyone recommended 8gb I bought 16, now that 16 is the recommended I'm gonna buy 32.
The best way to test this is having two systems with different amounts of Ram and see how that impacts game performance.
Or just take out some of your ram and see how it runs with that.
how much does this huge bottle neck actually effect things tho? No GPU is saturating an x16 pci-e 3.0 as it stands(outside of enterprise stuff), is this because of how the games are designed or would unified pool just make things easier to dev for?
The bottle neck has a huge effect, as you guessed it's because games aren't built right now to try to stream data straight off the drive because doing so is largely impossible. The current best approach is to have a huge, thick circular buffer, to account for the slow transfer speed. Remember, when you talk about "saturating PCI-e 3.0" you're talking about concurrent data transmission. Regardless of how much you are transferring at once, there is always the cost of a single trip. In the future, you'll see them saturate the bus, because if they can't get around the transfer speed, the solution is to transfer as much as possible each trip.
Since that bus doesn't exist on consoles, transfer speed from drive to ram is more important (but still a bottleneck).
When 8GB was recommended, I was buying ddr3 still, so good luck with that approach...
That being said, 32GB will become the requirement when I need to run homelab VMs on my gaming machine