When 32GB becomes the standard it's also when 32GB of RAM is stupid cheap.
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Will 32gb ram become the "recommended" going forward for pc owners?
- Thread starter Stacey
- Start date
Yup.
There is pretty much no reason for someone to not be at 16GB these days.
Thats mostly caching not actually using the 13GB of RAM.
Most current games wont have any penalty running on 8GB of RAM.
I do think as we go through the generation 16GB of RAM will become the defacto ram requirement.
The shift i see being really impactful is an I/O spec being listed for Rec and Ideal specifications.
Right now its still xxxGB of storage, in future I see them saying xxxGB of SSD storage to reach 1440p60.
Devs are smart though, chances are they will be working on getting their engines much more efficient and MS is bringing DirectStorage to Windows so a 32GB Ram spec isnt likely to actually become a thing this generation.
DirectStorage
– DirectStorage is an all new I/O system designed specifically for gaming to unleash the full performance of the SSD and hardware decompression. It is one of the components that comprise the Xbox Velocity Architecture. Modern games perform asset streaming in the background to continuously load the next parts of the world while you play, and DirectStorage can reduce the CPU overhead for these I/O operations from multiple cores to taking just a small fraction of a single core; thereby freeing considerable CPU power for the game to spend on areas like better physics or more NPCs in a scene. This newest member of the DirectX family is being introduced with Xbox Series X and we plan to bring it to Windows as well.
I think as long as we upgrade to 20-24GB we are good for the rest of 7 years
There will be games with 16GB ram usage. There already is. Star Citizen. That game is using 97% of my 16GB ram and crashes if I disable pagefile on my SSD.
There will be games with 16GB ram usage. There already is. Star Citizen. That game is using 97% of my 16GB ram and crashes if I disable pagefile on my SSD.
Thanks for the replies! For some reason, RAM felt like kind of a "solved problem" to me. But that might just be because i don't play the latest and greatest games on my PC (i do that on the console), so my mid range hardware is always just sufficient enough.
Also, because it feels like Laptops had 16gigs of ram for almost 10 years now ...
RAM in gaming is mainly used to load UHD assets and massive geometry, would that (broadly) be correct? If so, 32gb is a daaaaamn lot of RAM...
I think having only 16GB will force you to close everything before playing most SEX and PS5-grade games, because browsers and sites are heavier and heavier (i almost always have 3GB+ memory eaten by my web browsers).
On personal level, i am with the 256GB kit, but that's because of my hatred for cloud on home solutions and my specific needs... so yeah don't take my case in count, but i truly believe that 32GB will bring more flexibility, and you can stop thinking on what is open when you start your game.
On personal level, i am with the 256GB kit, but that's because of my hatred for cloud on home solutions and my specific needs... so yeah don't take my case in count, but i truly believe that 32GB will bring more flexibility, and you can stop thinking on what is open when you start your game.
I would have thought getting the data from the hard drive to RAM would be the bigger bottleneck. Is faster DDR5 the only way to alleviate that bottleneck in the near future?
I'm going to go for 256GB of RAM and create a RAM disk to shift the game I'm currently running onto it 😏
Data from the drive to system RAM is the biggest bottle neck, but transfer from system ram to vram isn't much better. Since both have to occur with a circular buffer on PC, it's like a double penalty.
The solution is thicker busses. This is the "9 women can't have a baby in 1 month" problem, but the flip side is "9 women can have 9 babies in 9 months." PCI-e 4.0 video cards will have 16 lanes to transfer with as opposed to the current 8. Slower transfer, but more per transfer to offset the bottleneck. Hence the need for more VRAM. Instead of a tiny amount of VRAM being filled frequently with small amounts of data, a large amount of VRAM being filled with infrequently with a large amount of data.
consoles don't have to transfer from system ram to vram, that concept doesn't exist. So the penalty from reading from drive to ram is much lessened. So they can get away with less ram, as their circular buffers can be smaller. The downside is, however, if you ever DO need to store something huge in VRAM on a console, well, you outright have less ram available. That's why console makers right now are making a huge deal about streaming, because they're trying their hardest to stretch less ram further. But ultimately, what you are immediately using still needs to fit into ram. SSDs and such are not replacements for RAM.
As noted earlier, if your travel speed exceeds the streaming transfer rate, you'll see stutter or outright pauses in your game. So right now, with next gen consoles, the assumption is with the current (UE5 demo) level of fedility, the amount of data they are transferring at the speed a player would traverse is good enough (and it appears to be so). But if, like, the amount of data they wanted to stream doubled, they'd be in big trouble. With a fatter circular buffer, like the solution on PC would be, that wouldn't be as much as a problem, as it's already inherently transferring much more data infrequently.
One thing to say, though: raytracing, in the future, by the nature of physically simulating many of the things you need buffers to store values for in conventional forward rendering, will massively reduce the size of assets in the future. Not this upcoming next-generation, but probably next-next generation, once most things are raytraced rather than only some things being raytraced. We're in the N64 days of raytracing. Once we hit original xbox levels, everything will change.
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Honestly it won't be recommended until ddr6 is a thing and we don't even have ddr5 released yet.
So yeah if you're doing a build now just stick with 16gb and save yourself $80.
So yeah if you're doing a build now just stick with 16gb and save yourself $80.
Maybe by end of gen it'll be recommended but 16gb will just fine for like 95% of stuff, there isn't much that regular consumers do that touches 16gb of ram including gaming.
That said, look at how VRAM requirements expanded this gen. At the beginning of this gen, having 3 GB of VRAM was a lot. Today, 11 GB of VRAM isn't too uncommon, a $500 1080ti can hit that. Meanwhile, you can currently get a card with like 6GB of VRAM, double what was "a lot" at the start of the generation, for like $150. These modern consoles are launching with roughly around the same ballpark as current cards. It shouldn't be long before you start seeing 19, 24, 28, etc GB of VRAM for not-insane prices. As in, within the $1000 range, as opposed to $3000-4000 range.
You cant really compare console vs pc ram. GTA 5 ran on 256mb system ram+256mb vram on xbox360/PS3.
But still 16gb ram should be enough for next 3 years..
That comes down to windows, you can use a slim linux distro and get comparable ram utilization. Lowendgaming is a reddit specifically for people getting things to run on insanely low amounts of resources.
That said, you outright haven't been able to buy ram that miniscule in PC land for years and years and years now.
Nvidia is stingy though. Sure, a 1080ti has 11GB, but a more capable 2080s only has 8. RAM offered doesn't scale with the raw capability of hardware.
Like for like, 500usd doesn't really represent the "common" market.
the 2080ti has 11 gb
that said, the 2080s isn't really that much more capable than the 1080ti. They offer roughly the same performance. You are trading vram for RT cores in that instance.
it's better to compare the 2080s to the 1080 OC, of which also had 8gb VRAM. they occupy roughly the same consumer space (i.e. one step below their flagship).
That said, Nvidia's prices went up. The 2080s is now the price that the 1080ti was, and the 2080ti is at a price more in line with what the old TitanX was at.
ofc, but you're not paying high end mainstream 500usd prices for that.
And when the 1080ti was new, you weren't paying $500 for it either. That was the price the 1080 OC was. When I bought my 1080ti it was like $900. Which is my entire point: the price for a lot of VRAM is going down.
That's my point, 11 GB isn't exactly common. It's stuck at the high end.
It really isn't. You can get 16gb Radeon cards for like $350.
$500 isn't the high end, either. And because I know you're going to complain, being expensive != high end. The current high-end is like $1300.
I think read speed of my NVMe drive is 3,5GB/s, saturating PCIE3.
And GPUs normally have hundreds of gigabytes per second, with HBM2 reaching around a terabyte per second. Right?
Did you get a bit carried away, or am I misunderstanding something?
Yup, it's basically a bad buying decision to buy more RAM right now if you have at least 16GB of RAM. Same with NVMe SSDs if you already have one at least 500GB.
Also, it's hilarious to see the RAM hoarders in here..."well you should just get 64GB of RAM, what not?" 🤣
Hey devs, don't even dare to use more resources, specially when RAM become cheaper as time passes. Don't you even dare devs..
It kind of already is the standard recommended for a new build, but 16gb will holds its own for some time yet.
Do you think PCs will eventually have a unified memory pool? What would it take for that to happen?
16GB is the minimum anyone building a new gaming pc today should buy, 32GB is already the recommended to future proof yourself but that much ram won't be a requirement for a few more years.
Single sticks of 32GB are going to be common when DDR5 comes around and single sticks of 8GB are going to be less common, like 8GB sticks of DDR4 are the standard in the DIY market as opposed to 4GB sticks.
In 2023 you probably reach 32GB just to have dual channel.
In 2023 you probably reach 32GB just to have dual channel.
iGPU APUs already do that, they use System RAM for everything.
On the highend of things....Nothing will bring us to that point.
As long as PC builders can mix and match CPUs and GPUs having a unified pool doesnt make much sense.
The GPU makers would have to sell people VRAM-less GPUs and motherboards would have to support GPU speed RAM for the system.
Or the opposite where the GPUs VRAM is used as system RAM.
Its a nightmare just thinking about it.....but it is doable, just not really practical right now.