16GB of RAM no longer enough for gaming?

[barlew]

This one took me by surprise. Whilst I wait for my shiny new Valeon, I have been playing BF 2042 on my back-up laptop. This little beast has an I5-10300H and a GTX 1650 with 16GB of RAM.

Now I must admit this snuck up on me, having a BF sesh this evening I was monitoring the little beasts stats using MSI Afterburner and noticed that in every game my RAM usage was 15.5GB.

As the little beast is a valiant bit of kit but not at the forefront of cutting edge technology, I am playing with all settings on low except textures which are set to medium, so I thought Afterburner was probably having a bit of a fit. I tabbed out and checked my RAM usage in Task Manager and low and behold BF was indeed using 15.5GB.

This has come as a bit of a shock to me as the only other game I have played which uses this amount of RAM is Flight Simulator for obvious reasons.

I fear we are reaching a tipping point in PC gaming where the standard recommendation of 16GB is no longer adequate.

 

[SpyderTracks]

This one took me by surprise. Whilst I wait for my shiny new Valeon, I have been playing BF 2042 on my back-up laptop. This little beast has an I5-10300H and a GTX 1650 with 16GB of RAM.

Now I must admit this snuck up on me, having a BF sesh this evening I was monitoring the little beasts stats using MSI Afterburner and noticed that in every game my RAM usage was 15.5GB.

As the little beast is a valiant bit of kit but not at the forefront of cutting edge technology, I am playing with all settings on low except textures which are set to medium, so I thought Afterburner was probably having a bit of a fit. I tabbed out and checked my RAM usage in Task Manager and low and behold BF was indeed using 15.5GB.

This has come as a bit of a shock to me as the only other game I have played which uses this amount of RAM is Flight Simulator for obvious reasons.

I fear we are reaching a tipping point in PC gaming where the standard recommendation of 16GB is no longer adequate.

Do note there's a big difference between RAM allocation and RAM usage. Battlefield is a resource Hog in that it will ask for as much as it can take, doesn't mean it's actually using it though.

You can usage Vs allocation in resource monitor.

 

[barlew]

Do note there's a big difference between RAM allocation and RAM usage. Battlefield is a resource Hog in that it will ask for as much as it can take, doesn't mean it's actually using it though.

You can usage Vs allocation in resource monitor.

Well that put my distinctly amateur hot take into perspective. Upon close inspection are bang on. BF is allocating between 10 and 15 GB RAM but only using about 6.5 GB.

 

[EchoDarkly]

Do note there's a big difference between RAM allocation and RAM usage. Battlefield is a resource Hog in that it will ask for as much as it can take, doesn't mean it's actually using it though.

You can usage Vs allocation in resource monitor.

God, I learn something new every time I log in! 👍 was almost heading to “Amend Order” 😂

 

[barlew]

God, I learn something new every time I log in! 👍 was almost heading to “Amend Order” 😂

Lol sorry dude.

 

[SpyderTracks]

Well that put my distinctly amateur hot take into perspective. Upon close inspection are bang on. BF is allocating between 10 and 15 GB RAM but only using about 6.5 GB.

Wow, that's a big margin! It's a very greedy game, you could argue it's not well coded for PC, but perhaps it's more for future performance in mind that they've made those allocations.

I'm guessing they may have some pretty beefy DLC in the pipeline and have thought ahead.

 

[SpyderTracks]

Interestingly it does appear that it may be a bug in Battlefield allocating basically whatever RAM is available, and creeps up game by game:

Increasing RAM usage after every game

This is happening to me every time I start BF2042. First game RAM usage is at 7-8GB. Second game 8-10GB. Third game 10-12GB. Fourth game 12-16GB. Anything after the fourth game is 16GB which is max for my system. FPS drops drastically once at 16GB which isn’t surprising. Only thing that works in...

answers.ea.com

 

[AccidentalDenz]

I've only ever played Battlefield on my old Xbox 360, would be tempted to give it a go on PC, but I enjoy pausing a game to Alt+Tab often to look up game guides or whatever and having a game allocate pretty much everything I've got is not ideal

 

[DarTon]

I'm not sure 16GB is inadequate for most gaming. I do think though that 32GB may become the norm simply due to price.

It's now much cheaper for foundries like Micron to produce 8x2GB on a single stick than 16x1GB. Hence why most low to mid range 32GB (2x16GB) RAM kits, excepting some Samsung b-die, are now single rank, rather than dual rank.

Hence we see the price of 32GB (2x16GB) kits converge down to where 16GB (2x8GB) kits were in 2020. You can now get 32GB of Corsair 3200MHz CL16 for £97, Patriot Viper Steel 3600Mhz CL18 for £90. This is the lowest I've seen it but prices have been down at £110-£140 for a few months now. It started 2021 at £170-220.

If it becomes normal for 32GB to be £90-100 when 16GB is £60-70, it's going to be very tempting to go for 32GB.

 

[CMP01]

16Gb is fine for most games. My specs below has 32Gb but it's more a future proofing/longevity/just in case thing than a what's the limit now thing. I mean, most games won't be maxing out the 5800X or 6800XT (at 3440x1440) just yet either but lucky windfalls aside I very likely won't even be thinking of upgrading until at least the CPU/GPU gen after the next (but probably only actually doing so for the one after that considering my last desktop was a Skylake/Pascal build in 2016)
Tbh in the case of the RAM the extra cost of 32Gb over 16Gb wasn't onerous (maybe half again as much rather than twice the price) but I'm wary enough after being caught wanting before that spending a little extra now to mitigate shortfalls later is no biggie.
And yeah, I have to admit I just wanted a ridiculously good PC on a level I never had before and for once could actually afford it
(I'm only human after all)