@@patpatboy2most of this episode appears to be an ad. I'm getting bored 3 minutes in. I briefly got excited when he said "mounting with two screws" because I thought he was making an obscene joke. Giggity.
That's not a rule, I have uninstalled AMD drivers the usual way and I had no problems. Now, running DDU can mess up your Microsoft Office installation and a few other programs. Therefore, DDU should be your last resource if you are dealing with display corruption.
I'm literally running Nvidia and AMD gpus side by side for 2 years now (each having their own monitor) with both drivers installed and never had a single flicker.
With a modern SSD, chances are the game allocates more to RAM when it's available and otherwise just prioritizes what is on RAM by what is needed right now. Then it can swap data between SSD and RAM quickly when necessary behind the scenes, so it really doesn't affect framerate. Try this test with an HDD and I bet the differences would be more drastic.
I am genuinely surprised that these games ran just fine on only 8 GB of RAM... Maybe I should've never upgraded from my old Intel Core 2 Quad Q9550, 8 GB DDR2 800, GTX 560 SC gaming rig 🤣
@@Nightingale1887 Just goes to show you that if your current PC is running your games well enough that you're happy, you don't NEED to upgrade just to have the latest stuff. I've got my younger brother setup on an i7-2400, 16 GB DDR3 1600, and a GTX 1050 Ti, and he's running games well enough that he's happy. Shoot, I'm only up to an i7-4790K (not overclocked, thanks to losing the silicon lottery), 16 GB DDR3 1600, and a GTX 1070, and I'm happy with how it runs the games I currently play. I'm sure I'll upgrade in the next year or two, but I've gotten a lot of good use out of this hardware!
My gaming setup: BSEL modded E2160, 4gb of ddr2, vmodded hd4670, 19" 1280x1024 I can run AAA games like Oblivion/Skyrim, Fallout 3/NV, Mass Effect 1/2/3, Dragon Age 1/2/3.
@patpatboy2 I have a 4790k paired with a 3gb 1060 (lol I know) with 32gb ddr3 ram and surprisingly still plays every game I throw at it, even Escape from tarkov, cod, bf. I'm selling that though, not sure how much I should sell it for but yea that was my first built pc and did me wonder. Currently running a 6700k paired with a 1080 ti and of course it runs everything as well. Will probably sell that too (not sure for how much its worth) cause I just got a 13700k and a 3080 gpu.
Most game are not really RAM intensive as long as your GPU as enought RAM (GDDR RAM), most of the RAM used by games is the cache of objects that you might need to send to the GPU. So decreasing the RAM amount does not really lower FPS, but tends to lower 99% in some case as there is more chance that some assets are not loaded even in RAM, so in this case you need to fetch them from your storage which is slow. The exemple he mentionned at the end of the video are typically management game which deal with a lot of "entities" and need to keep track about them which can consumme a greater amount of RAM.
Surprised 8GB is still holding up so well, albeit with dual channel configuration. I'm sure a big part of this is that you were using GPU's with 12GB of VRAM, so you were never VRAM limited. That's how these tests should be run so that system RAM is the only variable affecting results, but users attempting to get away with 8GB of system RAM will see a lot more performance issues if they don't have as much VRAM (on certain games and settings obviously).
I was also thinking the VRAM could be the limiting factor. Something like a 3070Ti might be a good test for this as it’s fast but only has 8Gb of video memory.
@@DawidDoesTechStuff It'd make for an interesting video. But that would just be testing the 3070 Ti's performance hit when it runs out of VRAM. Typically when games run out of VRAM, they try to utilize system RAM to make up the difference, and if that runs out they'll jump over to using storage (SSD or HDD). Lower system RAM just increases the chance of a worse performance hit due to spillover into storage.
@@DawidDoesTechStuff I doubt it, you'd just have to run with lower graphics settings as you've demonstrated with so many of the bargain basement PCs you've reviewed, pretty much all of them will run just about everything if you make a few compromises. Gaming PCs have reached something of a plateau the last few years, were really it's more about how much detail you want vs. the performance that matters.
Something I noticed when I finally upgraded from 8GB of RAM was that my FPS didn't change, my load times improved dramatically. I was having like full two-minute load times on Deus Ex: Mankind Divided (loading from an HDD) before the upgrade, afterwards it was only thirty-second load times, even though once I was in a level the performance was identical. Something you might consider testing.
@@Alekscho996 Nope. Just a straight RAM upgrade. It didn't affect boot times or anything like that, just load times for games. I assume it was because Windows suddenly wasn't having to throw a bunch of stuff in the paging file, which means less HDD reads/writes.
Maybe turn of pagefiles. If your SSD is fast enough windows uses it as memory Edit: True. Windows can utilize HDD too, but they are much slower, thus you can see it. But nowadays SDDs are getting so fast you can't even notice when pagefiles are in use
Not if your ssd is fast enough. Literally any ssd will do. Even on Hard drives that has been a thing. Also if you have 2gb vram and 16gb ram you actually have 10gb vram
@@DawidDoesTechStuff i actually recently switched from my hdd i had since 2014 to a Kingston a400. And i can yell you boy did it make my amd fx feel like a threadripper🤣🤣. Still insanely trash. But sexier trash
This might be due to Proton shaders, but on my Linux desktop Horizon Zero Dawn did not work well at all with 8GB of RAM. And an online friend using Windows (and possibly an unreasonable amount of bloatware) needed a RAM upgrade too for the game. Otherwise, I haven't seen any game that hated 8GB of RAM, but on the occasional video edits I do, having 16GB helps a lot.
Actually pretty impressive video ngl. I've been telling people you don't need 32gb of ram to play games, 16gb is just enough, and apparently to my surprise, 8gb is still enough lol. I wonder if vram availability has anything to do with it since he is using a 13700k and 4090 gpu.
Good point about VRAM. It shows me game developers tune their games to work on weak systems, since a lot of buyers of video games are kids with rappy systems (not all but a good number). A real baffling video. I have to say I watch Dawid for comedy but this was a shocker that no other channel has really mentioned.
@@DawidDoesTechStuff You might want to check this with one of the Far Cry games in that case. Those actually use asset caching in VRAM, e.g. FC5 allocates up to 15GB during cutscenes on my RTX 4090, but it's happy with just up to 9GB on my GTX 1080Ti at highest settings. Also keep in mind that Starfield is basically an Xbox port to PC, therefore you can pretty much expect it not using more than 6GB RAM if your system is memory constrained.
SSD helps a lot. My friend has laptop with just 4GB of RAM and SSD but it felt incredibly snappy. Altough I also felt Windows chewing up that SSD with it's memory swapping operations
You have to test it with Chrome running in the background. Honestly and considering how many games have multiple monitors, more tests should include some standard apps running in the background while gaming. Or running UA-cam while gaming, or even while streaming.
@@daniil3815 those are the sacrifices you make with only 8GB, of course it’ll crash with Chrome open in the background. Mines used to all the time before I upgraded to 16GB.
@@AirCatcherI do that....I listen to youtube videos while running games at windowed mode for smooth multitasking. I have 12GB of RAM....it is fine, no stutter as well.
I watch Dawid Does Tech Stuff for the comedy, but this time I was completely blown away by the science. Can we give a moment of appreciation for Dawid? Not even LTT and other channels in the millions of users have found out what Dawid discovered in this video, at least to my knowledge. Possibly even the professionally done Marques Brownlee channel with phones. Amazing work by Dawid. I'm speculating that game developers deliberately tweak their programs so they run nearly as well on weak hardware systems as they do on strong hardware systems. Or as another viewer wrote, maybe the VRAM compensates. Weird. I hope LTT does something to explain this after a hat tip to Dawid for discovering the phenomena.
8GB of RAM used to be enough not that long ago. Also like others already pointed out, Windows creates about the same amount of virtual RAM on the System Drive, which these days is usually a fast nvme SSD.
Another game that pretty regularly goes above 16 gigs of ram for me is hunt showdown, and when I had 16 gigs it was only using 10-12 iirc. Could be placebo, but in that case it did feel like it gave me more fps.
Unlike what people like to meme, the game actually is optimized. It will grab more ram when its available, and dump assets when it can't. Because it recognizes there are ram limits, it will actively adapt and there will be some extra loading because of it. Occasionally fps may spike because of that extra disk processes because of less ram
I have 32gb and I never max it out unless I’m doing some crazy virtualization. I have enough to run a game, a virtual machine, and browse the internet all at the same time if I wanted
Yea except these results would be different if he had chrome, discord, Spotify, rgb software, and whatever other bloatware normal users overlook running in the background. It’s definitely not necessary but nice to have, especially since ram is pretty affordable nowadays. For a budget rig you could pick up 32 gb of ddr4 3600 cl18 silicon power ram for like $37.
@@theoneneo5024you should watch the video again because in the ladder quarter of the video he does specifically that, even points out he had 30 Firefox tabs open and it made no difference
You can dedicate RAM to your iGPU by using a custom BIOS which you can do by using rufos, a USB and some other stuff. There's UA-cam videos on how to do that and I recommend trying it out. I've done it for my Ryzen 7 5700u which has a Radeon RX Vega 8 iGPU.
in certain games my monitor also flickers which I found was caused by having adaptive sync enabled, I even noticed the flickers on Starfield which was fixed by disabling freesync.
I noticed flickering when playing PS5 games at "40fps" settings with ARR on. Most monitors can only ARR to a certain fps before having issues and cause it to flicker like that. I hate it.
The mobo on my prebuilt accepts 64 GB of RAM----I'm not trying to send men to the moon or change the space-time continuum, so not sure why I would need that
You should have tested the amount of time it takes to lauch and relaunch a game as well as load and reload a map/level. Having less RAM means less of the file system is cached. I don't think it would make much of a difference with a nvme ssd, but I'd think that someone with only 8GB of RAM would be more likely to be running off a sata ssd or a mechanical drive.
I suspect having lower RAM won't affect *regular* performance that much, but it will increase the frequency of frame dips (reflected by the drastically lower 1% FPS). Ideally you'd want to either graph the FPS over time and compare how many dips there are among the different configurations, or get it numerically by... something like the second derivative of FPS/time?
The games worked fine because of the swap file, if you disable it many games wont launch with 8gb, also if u put it in a slower drive (hdd or a sata ssd) it will probably reduce the performance
Games nowadays benefit or even require an SSD. Even if it needs to go back and forth between volatile and non-volatile storage, at least it no longer has to wait for a slow mechanical hard drive to keep up. Try 8GB dual channel again but with the games on an HDD.
Try to set your monitor's brightness to 100% with monitor's contrast to 50% and see if the flickering is still there. As for RAM, a bit surprised myself. I do tend to have at least 100s tabs open in Opera (up to a couple of thousand) which after a while it tends to eat up a bit of RAM, but since the rest of my machine is almost 9yo now, I tend to close it when gaming demanding games. Perhaps you could try with some video editing in the background, but I guess no one in their right mind would do that if they knew they had only 8GB of RAM and trying to play RAM hungry games.
That flickering has been a known problem with G-sync since forever, especially when you enable it for windowed applications as well as exclusive fullscreen ones. G-sync was designed assuming that whatever it's displaying is refreshing as fast as possible and doesn't really know what to do when the focused application doesn't regularly refresh it's graphics output. If some window you have open is refreshing just below the minimum native refresh rate, the g-sync module in the monitor gets REALLY confused, and that's when you see that flickering. (tl;dr - flickering means turn off windowed g-sync)
@@Xerou Eh, I do it all the time with less demanding games (for example Fallout 3, or 2D games), and I used to do it even back when I had my quad core Q or E something something. (bad memory). And my computer now kinda sucks for 2023 (i7 5960X, GTX 1660 Super). Of course I have 64GB of RAM in quad channel, but still even before it was possibly depending on the game.
I'm actually surprised how few people mention nvme SSD. Some have noted ssd vs HDD but the speed difference between nvme SSD and SATA SSD are huge. Roughly 10x (500mbs vs 5000mbs) Retest this with a SATA SSD and there will be a huge difference.
It seems the most important thing for gaming in terms of RAM is having dual channel for more bandwidth to the cpu and low latency rather than just more capacity. Which most of us already knew it's just some people like snobbing it up to justify their 64gb of ram. I've seen people unironically say 32gb is not enough for "future proofing" whatever that means
Was chatting with someone on Facebook who said that 32 GB of RAM is the minimum he would ever consider for gaming. 🙄 (Currently have 8 GB of single stick RAM in my aging desktop, next on the upgrade path).
A few games can actually easily fill up 64 gigs of Ram. Cities Skylines being the prime example. Use all DLCs and load in a bunch of mods and graphical assets from the Workshop and you get "out of memory" messages with 32 gigs very, very easily. So you better have 64 gigs if you want to go crazy with mods and assets there. Can't wait to see if Cities Skylines 2 will be the same ram eating monster. IL DIVINO: Michelangelo's Sistine Ceiling in VR is another "game" that recommends 64 gigs. And there's nothing wrong with future proofing. If you're not poor and you can afford it, why not drop in 64 gigs today? There's nothing wrong with it.
@@ShadowAngel1860 Also consider Rimworld, a game that you normally use less than 1gig on the primary storage drive... I've heavily modded it and made it use 40 gigs of memory alone. Modding gets nuts and 64 is definitely recommended for heavy modders. If you don't, then yeah 32 is great. 16 is bare minimum now, and you will suffer for it.
Thanks for this Dawid. Good video. I had just put 32Gb in my basket for an upgrade from tight latency 16Gb. I needn't bother touching more ram at all. All the best to you!
Starfield still suffering from that TDP bug for Nvidia GPUs. Usually the 4090 to uses about 400 watts of power but for star field it's under 300... My EVGA 3070 for the win is still using about 70 watts under what it should.
Maybe 8GB kit works just as well as 16 thanks to fast ssd? not only it is fast enough to load stuff in time but also it is used as virtual ram (pagefile).
I don't understand why, when I'm playing games my GPU isn't being fully used. It'll be on 40% GPU and 30% CPU. I'll be getting an average of about 70-100 Fps on Low - Max Setting. Idk if it's bottle necked. I'm using a GPU - RTX 4070-Ti CPU - Ryzen 5 5600x RAM - 16Gb - 3000 MHz MBD - A320M-A PRO SSD - Kingston SA400S37480g (I'm running windows 10 off it) HDD - Toshiba HDWD110 I run my games at 1440p 165hz on a single Monitor. All my drivers and stuff are all up to date also. appreciated
I'm guessing because your running the tests @ 1440p, it might not be stressing the CPU as much. Interested to see the same test @ 1080p and see what happens.
My guess is that while some may RECOMMEND 16GB of more, they may all mostly play with 8GB and if there is extra RAM needed, perhaps it re-adjusts the graphics load to allow the video card to perhaps handle a bit more processing that the RAM otherwise would perhaps. So for example, texture data or player movement, although maybe the video card does handle all of this. But my guess is that 16GB or higher probably assumes you have other stuff running in the background, and that the OS will consume 4GB just by itself.
Play Anno 1800 and have 100k population. I had at the later stages 28GB ram usage, and I didn't even got close to 100k, and a big fleet. It depends on the game you play. Shooters and games where the "playfield" is static don't use much RAM and your fine with 16GB. Play any builder game and 32GB will not be enough.
I have 64GB because when I bought it there was not much difference in prices between that kit and 32GB known dual rank kit and at least at that time with 64GB DDR4 there wasn't risk of being single rank. I thought it would be overkill, but lately I have been hoping I would have even more because I have been running out of ram 😄 I use virtual machines and lately I have discovered how useful ram drive is in some cases, so those (and tab hoarding) explains the need for more, not gaming.
It really goes to show how good modern operating systems are at managing RAM. They compress and swap uncommonly used pages, saving tons of memory. Fast storage can help make swap so fast that its barely perceptible when data is swapped. Maybe if you tried 8GB of RAM on an HDD instead of an SSD it would make more of a difference. Now, I don't use MSI Afterburner so I might be wrong, but I'm pretty sure that the "RAM" number is not allocation, but actual "memory usage". There are a lot of terms and nuances here: - "Allocated memory", called "Committed" by Windows and "Virtual memory" by Linux: represents how much memory the program asked the OS, largely irrelevant number, some programs ask for hundreds of GB of memory and never use it (Chrome on Linux usually asks for upwards of 120GB of memory for example) - "Used memory", called "Used" by Windows and "Anonymous memory" by Linux: represents how much memory the program is physically using, usually only physically allocated when the program writes to it. The GPU "MEM" field of afterburner probably refers to memory allocated, while the CPU "MEM" field very probably refers to used memory.
been saying for a while that 32gb is necessary these days. MINIMUM 16 GIGS. But if you want a comfortable experience where you never gotta worry about it without being complete overkill, 32gb is the sweet spot
nah its not. yes i did watch the video. clearly 32gb was the only one producing max ram output without any sacrificing. thats fine, you can run games where youre sacrificing ram, you might not be able to see why but youre dropping something somewhere. ill keep playing on my 32gig and never worrying about any of this bs lol@@TheCudder4life
another year isnt good enough for me lol if it was good for another 3-5 sure. but if your saying in 1 year your probably going to have to upgrade ur ram, and it already doesnt output max ram capabilities then why not just have 32 and be comfortable knowing youre good for the next 5 years. its like $20@@Rhino4272
@ayeimjustabackup There are no discernable differences between 16 and 32. The next time I upgrade, it will be to DDR5. 32 is a waste for gaming at this point
Windows is really good at RAM allocation. The more you have the more stuff will be allocated to the physical RAM, when you game with just 8GBs then most of Windows stuff is thrown to the swap memory so all game assets can be loaded to the RAM memory
I wonder if the games are using your Hard drive as RAM storage when your only at 8GB of ram, so maybe see what happens if you use a mechanical drive instead of an SSD drive.
@@lukasvincourcz7043 yup. Seems like a lot of people mention what i said as well. Its alot less noticeable with nvme drives though with how quick read and writes are.
FYI never think about getting a single channel RAM build, I just upgraded my PC from 16 single channel to 32 dual channel (just to be clear I never had RAM size issues so the difference didn't affect performance). After the upgrade I literally went from 30 FPS that drops to 20 on Resident Evil 4 Remake to being a constant 60 on higher graphics settings for example. In emulation too, I went from running most Switch games at their native 30 FPS cap to being able to play at a modded 60 FPS (before, it used to be at 30-40 FPS at best).
Honestly there's no reason for any modern system to be running single channel RAM, unless you're reselling scavenged e-waste Dells on eBay as "gaming computers". Especially with good quality DDR4 RAM being so cheap and plentiful right now, and even DDR5 isn't that much of a bank breaker.
So I am also wondering if you are using ssd's in all your examples? Consider maybe swapping to hdd and see what happens? Im wondering if the page swaps have become very good on ssds that it becomes unnoticed, whereas if you use classic hdd, you'll see a difference. Something to test and do a part 2?
i have had 32k ram as MINIMUM since 2014 or 2013? when did 4790k come? it still tugging along at 5ghz on my secondary comp, 8bm? is that not 2001 or something? windows xp black edition I think i had 8gb? or was it 12? it was when rampage extreme had TRI channel right? so 4x3?
The reason why you're seeing what you're seeing is because the boot SSD is being used as a page file when the amount of physical RAM is not enough - on superfast NVME SSDs this isn't so much of a problem, but on slower SSDs (such as earlier NVME's and SATA drives) it is more noticeable, and ESPECIALLY SO if your boot disk is a mechanical hard drive. On a HP 15-ac153sa with Windows 7 and 16GB DDR3, the system completely chugs due to the lack of RAM and using the hard drive as a page file. With all of this in mind, I have a Corsair 128GB DDR4 kit in my desktop PC and I haven't looked back.
When mounting AIO radiators vertically, the tubes need to be at the bottom, not the top. If the tubes are on the top, the small amount of air in the system will constantly recirculate in the pump, causing cavitation and damage over time. It'll also cause the pump to be noisy.
Yeah, it's def using swap (pagefile) with the lower memory configs (like others have said). I currently have a single 8GB stick of DDR4 and I'm using 83% of RAM and 86% of SWAP (two web browsers, Discord, Chatterino). I *almost* don't notice having a low amount of RAM even with a game open on top of everything else because of the pagefile running off of my NVMe drive. 16GB of RAM is def the minimum config I'd recommend these days for even a basic system imho (to prevent overuse of the system drive), with 32GB being a nice sweet spot cause RAM isn't all that expensive. Interesting video for sure!
Try Anno 1800 and start building and watch your Ram go up. I had my system Pull 28GB and I didn't even have a massive fleet and over 150k population. At the start you can run it on 8GB, but pretty fast it is not enough.
Also having a good cpu helps with less ram. If you have an average cpu or mid range u won’t be able to run these games or if at all smoothly. So this title is misleading
Both those cards have 12GB VRAM so they can keep all game assets loaded there. Try with 8GB (3070 Ti or 7600) or 6GB (2060 or 5600 XT) and I'll bet you see a bigger hit to FPS with 8GB (maybe even 16GB?) even though those are lower performance GPUs.
Something that is vastly underrepresented in the testing space is city/factory builders. City skylines and Factorio both come to mind. Maybe not the most flashy of games, but both are massive databases the need the RAM equivalent of a 4090 to die slower. After all the factory will expand to fill the resources of the improving system. I know Factorio has a sizeable technical community that has some bench marking maps.
The thing with RAM amount is that it dosn't have any impact on performance until you have not enough of it and there ARE applicatication and/or games that require more then 16GB of ram like super heavily modded mincraft with hd textures and shaders, super modded mincraft will actually crash with an out of memory exception if you try to load a shader unless you have 16GB of ram allocated, not in your system allocated so 16GB is not enogh for that. It also depends on how much stuff you have running in the background becouse if you got just barly enough ram to run the game it will suffer when chrome running in the background. Also once your rams close to full windows will automatically start to page out background application, which is why you never see 100% ram usage.
Fun fact. I have a Legion 5 Laptop with a RTX 3060 with 6gb vram and originally 16gb of ram (1gb of shared GPU memory to the VEGA 8 of the 5800h). Last of us would stutter and average under 40fps at 1080p mid~high and crash in a few minutes. I thought VRAM was the issue, but after I upgraded to 32gb of RAM, the game run flawlessly at 50+ fps most of the time, with full VRAM allocation (mixed mid-high settings, high texture for chracacter models). Few VRAM memory offloads some assets (not all) to the system ram. My 3090 uses far less ram even with higher settings in Last of us than my Notebook. Ram utilization on my notebook was about 22gb of ram for TLOU Emulation, DCS and Tarkov are notorious for demading more than 16gb of RAM. Unfortunately 16gb is not enough even with a mid-tier graphic card like the 3060.
I think this really suggests that Dual Channel but low capacity is a better short term investment for an upgrade to a very budget system than simply getting higher capacity single channel, but these results suggest I might not have seen any immediate increase if I had just gotten a single 16 planning to get a second 16 stick to run dual later like I had considered. Because I definitely noticed a significant performance increase switching from single 8g to 2x8g on a pre built AMD platform.
If you use more than one screen and have chrome discord etc open. Then you can see a benefit with more than 16GB. When I had 16 GB and used to have games up while doing something else on my second monitor, the system felt way more stuttery. And I think that has to do with how much windows can cache while prioritizing a game, and thus with more RAM it will feel smoother to transition.
One reason for the stutter with dual monitors could be due to their refresh rates. I see it with many games. My second monitor is a POS and if I bounce from one to another the game gets confused at what refresh rate to run at.
Thank goodness Be Quiet also has the 601 series for those of us who aren't prepared to spend $330 on a case...but for those of us who are...uuunnnfff yes that's the one to get. So I definitely run DDU with a GPU change, every time, even staying with the same chipset maker, it makes all the difference. And as far as RAM amount, I notice when I have 16GB of RAM installed, my computer uses 12-13GB while gaming. When I have 32GB installed it hovers around 15-16GB, so I think 16GB works for my use case with the games I play but I can see where 32GB should be the "new" standard. 16GB is fine for most people, and 8GB is tolerable if you're trying to save the extra $30-$40 to get other better bits. Every dollar counts in a build because you'll be stuck with it for awhile unless you collect PC parts like...some of us...*sideeye*...but I don't know ANYTHING about that.
Like others have said I think it's the NVME SSD. I had a laptop with 4gb memory and it wasn't that bad most of the time, because it had an NVME. If you used a HDD or a Sata SSD I think it would be far more noticable.
That's surprise.... while having 16GB RAM is good advice it's clearly not must-have, as long as it's not set up by Dell or HP. Also, where did you get that awesome rug (on video around 2:50)?
I have 16gb in my system and to be honest i keep an eye on my usage and find that it is generally plenty. Even web browsing i have to open more tabs then is practical and its still plenty. I dont see myself jumping to 32gb any time soon
Is this ddr5? I run tarkov on 64gb of ddr4 at 3600mhz. It allocates up to 34gb. I guess I have discord up with 2 or 3 friends steams going on discord. I'd also say, your not loading into an online raid. Not near as much real time memory needed to keep track of online only entities.
I don't get it? I'm running a sapphire 6800xt as my main gaming 1440p monitor and I have my old Rog strix 1060 running my 3 smaller1080p monitors and have no driver issues. All I know for sure is that with the dirt cheap pricing on ddr4 ram, I upgraded to 64gb's and I have been experiencing more stable 0.1% lows and fewer random crashes. I must state that I simply turned on XMP and enabled the 3600mhz 18-22-22-22-42 profile on my x570 Asus-P prime board, but in my experience, more ram = more stability.
I think the biggest part of "you need more ram" is just : do you want to have stuff open in the background or do you not care. I was struggling with 16GB on Warzone because i kept my 300 Firefox tabs open, discord, steam, and more stuff It was eating all of it, i had to upgrade to 32GB to stop having a slideshow warzone experience. But closing firefox usually let me play with 16GB. Its more convenience than anything else
Warzone is an extreme outlier though. I've been running 16GB for 4 years now (planning an upgrade) and Warzone is the only game where I ran into any kind of memory issues. No other game complained, even with my daily programs (Steam, Discord, VSCode, Chrome, Spotify, and several other miscellaneous windows) open.
PS5 and XBSX both have a total of 16gb of memory for everything, with most of that being allocated to VRAM. These games probably need 4-6GB of actual RAM once you have a decent VRAM buffer. You'll probably have problems if you have an 8GB GPU w 8GB RAM because some of the data might start to bleed off to your SSD - though if you have a high speed gen4 SSD, its fast enough to handle minor stuff being dumped off.
We all seem to forget that windows can dynamically swap out data from memory if swap file is enabled. It should be able to manage most games with just 8gb. As long as you close background tasks
this seems to be a fairly common misconception. speed, CAS, and amount of channels can have an impact on FPS. however, capacity has literally nothing to do with performance, because it only determines a resource pool that will cause windows to just crash itself, the program, or not not allow programs to start. it's funny, too, because windows allocates more trash to RAM the more RAM it has. a freshly restarted windows system with 16GB idling will use 4-ish GB while the same system restarted with a 32GB kit swap will use 7-ish. 64GB is probably more. basically, if you don't use it you don't need it, but the latency, frequency, and amount of channels affects performance significantly.
Most games over-allocate RAM if it's available, just in case they need it. The games also don't use all the RAM all the time so can swap out a lot of it for a lot of the time. The biggest slow down you'll see is when loading assets, but with todays high speed SSDs (being used for swap space) that's not going to make much of a difference either.
I'm surprised no one pointed out, or that Dawid doesn't mention that just cause a certain amount of RAM shows up as "allocated" to the game, it doesn't mean the game is actually using all that RAM. That's why when he goes with less RAM, the software proportionally allocates less, but it still performs the same. Cause at higher allocations it wasnt using all of it anyway. I would still not feel comfortable with anything less than 16GB of dual channel RAM on a desktop...
In this episode, Dawid learns always to do a DDU when switching between Nvidia and AMD
Tonight, Dawid learns to DDU when switching between nVidia and AMD, gets confused why his gaming PC is running games well, and does an ad read.
@@patpatboy2most of this episode appears to be an ad. I'm getting bored 3 minutes in.
I briefly got excited when he said "mounting with two screws" because I thought he was making an obscene joke. Giggity.
Maybe he just wanted to flex on his rtx 4090
That's not a rule, I have uninstalled AMD drivers the usual way and I had no problems. Now, running DDU can mess up your Microsoft Office installation and a few other programs. Therefore, DDU should be your last resource if you are dealing with display corruption.
I'm literally running Nvidia and AMD gpus side by side for 2 years now (each having their own monitor) with both drivers installed and never had a single flicker.
With a modern SSD, chances are the game allocates more to RAM when it's available and otherwise just prioritizes what is on RAM by what is needed right now. Then it can swap data between SSD and RAM quickly when necessary behind the scenes, so it really doesn't affect framerate. Try this test with an HDD and I bet the differences would be more drastic.
Fair
Same results so you are wrong here too
@@-ZSOX the plot thickens
Pagefile has turned into magic nowadays. Before it was genuinely better to turn it off with HDDs, but now it's pretty dang useful.
Yeah a couple of people mentioned that. It’s a great idea. I’ll check it out when I have time. 👍
I am genuinely surprised that these games ran just fine on only 8 GB of RAM... Maybe I should've never upgraded from my old Intel Core 2 Quad Q9550, 8 GB DDR2 800, GTX 560 SC gaming rig 🤣
My second rig is a i5-2500K @ 4.4GHz DDR3 1600 8GB with a GTX1080 and it runs nearly all games, except really multicore heavy games.
@@Nightingale1887 Just goes to show you that if your current PC is running your games well enough that you're happy, you don't NEED to upgrade just to have the latest stuff.
I've got my younger brother setup on an i7-2400, 16 GB DDR3 1600, and a GTX 1050 Ti, and he's running games well enough that he's happy.
Shoot, I'm only up to an i7-4790K (not overclocked, thanks to losing the silicon lottery), 16 GB DDR3 1600, and a GTX 1070, and I'm happy with how it runs the games I currently play. I'm sure I'll upgrade in the next year or two, but I've gotten a lot of good use out of this hardware!
My gaming setup: BSEL modded E2160, 4gb of ddr2, vmodded hd4670, 19" 1280x1024
I can run AAA games like Oblivion/Skyrim, Fallout 3/NV, Mass Effect 1/2/3, Dragon Age 1/2/3.
@patpatboy2 I have a 4790k paired with a 3gb 1060 (lol I know) with 32gb ddr3 ram and surprisingly still plays every game I throw at it, even Escape from tarkov, cod, bf. I'm selling that though, not sure how much I should sell it for but yea that was my first built pc and did me wonder. Currently running a 6700k paired with a 1080 ti and of course it runs everything as well. Will probably sell that too (not sure for how much its worth) cause I just got a 13700k and a 3080 gpu.
Most game are not really RAM intensive as long as your GPU as enought RAM (GDDR RAM), most of the RAM used by games is the cache of objects that you might need to send to the GPU.
So decreasing the RAM amount does not really lower FPS, but tends to lower 99% in some case as there is more chance that some assets are not loaded even in RAM, so in this case you need to fetch them from your storage which is slow.
The exemple he mentionned at the end of the video are typically management game which deal with a lot of "entities" and need to keep track about them which can consumme a greater amount of RAM.
Surprised 8GB is still holding up so well, albeit with dual channel configuration. I'm sure a big part of this is that you were using GPU's with 12GB of VRAM, so you were never VRAM limited. That's how these tests should be run so that system RAM is the only variable affecting results, but users attempting to get away with 8GB of system RAM will see a lot more performance issues if they don't have as much VRAM (on certain games and settings obviously).
I was also thinking the VRAM could be the limiting factor. Something like a 3070Ti might be a good test for this as it’s fast but only has 8Gb of video memory.
@@DawidDoesTechStuff It'd make for an interesting video. But that would just be testing the 3070 Ti's performance hit when it runs out of VRAM. Typically when games run out of VRAM, they try to utilize system RAM to make up the difference, and if that runs out they'll jump over to using storage (SSD or HDD). Lower system RAM just increases the chance of a worse performance hit due to spillover into storage.
@@DawidDoesTechStuff I doubt it, you'd just have to run with lower graphics settings as you've demonstrated with so many of the bargain basement PCs you've reviewed, pretty much all of them will run just about everything if you make a few compromises. Gaming PCs have reached something of a plateau the last few years, were really it's more about how much detail you want vs. the performance that matters.
True ram paging file I'm worried
@@DawidDoesTechStuff Try a GTX 1650 :p
All of these "for science" videos you do are so awesome and Hilarious! Please keep them coming! 😂
I’m glad you enjoy them. 😃
Something I noticed when I finally upgraded from 8GB of RAM was that my FPS didn't change, my load times improved dramatically. I was having like full two-minute load times on Deus Ex: Mankind Divided (loading from an HDD) before the upgrade, afterwards it was only thirty-second load times, even though once I was in a level the performance was identical. Something you might consider testing.
Did you upgrade to a SSD along with the ram? Because that is most certainly to thank for the considerably faster load times.
@@Alekscho996 Nope. Just a straight RAM upgrade. It didn't affect boot times or anything like that, just load times for games. I assume it was because Windows suddenly wasn't having to throw a bunch of stuff in the paging file, which means less HDD reads/writes.
@@eldibs Could be the page file, but also windows caching reads to files in your 'unused' ram
Maybe turn of pagefiles. If your SSD is fast enough windows uses it as memory
Edit: True. Windows can utilize HDD too, but they are much slower, thus you can see it. But nowadays SDDs are getting so fast you can't even notice when pagefiles are in use
Not if your ssd is fast enough. Literally any ssd will do. Even on Hard drives that has been a thing. Also if you have 2gb vram and 16gb ram you actually have 10gb vram
windows literally did that with hard drives, except when they did that it was PAINFULly obvious, now its a bit harder to tell because of ssd speed
Maybe using page files with an HDD could be the way to get terrible performance with 8GB of Ram. 🤔
@@DawidDoesTechStuff i actually recently switched from my hdd i had since 2014 to a Kingston a400. And i can yell you boy did it make my amd fx feel like a threadripper🤣🤣. Still insanely trash. But sexier trash
@@DawidDoesTechStuff Better than that, set your page file to a USB 2 thumb drive. That should chop it off at the knees nicely.
I don't know why it is so entertaining to what Dawid being perplexed by failing to fail but it is. We need more accidental debunk videos!
This might be due to Proton shaders, but on my Linux desktop Horizon Zero Dawn did not work well at all with 8GB of RAM.
And an online friend using Windows (and possibly an unreasonable amount of bloatware) needed a RAM upgrade too for the game.
Otherwise, I haven't seen any game that hated 8GB of RAM, but on the occasional video edits I do, having 16GB helps a lot.
Actually pretty impressive video ngl. I've been telling people you don't need 32gb of ram to play games, 16gb is just enough, and apparently to my surprise, 8gb is still enough lol. I wonder if vram availability has anything to do with it since he is using a 13700k and 4090 gpu.
Good point about VRAM. It shows me game developers tune their games to work on weak systems, since a lot of buyers of video games are kids with rappy systems (not all but a good number). A real baffling video. I have to say I watch Dawid for comedy but this was a shocker that no other channel has really mentioned.
Yea, as the games might just be filling the VRAM buffer before using ram. Might explain why lower memory allocation didn't affect performance.
Yeah I was also thinking the 24GB of VRAM was helping. When I get around to it I’ll have a look at how something like a 3070Ti holds up with just 8GB.
@@DawidDoesTechStuff You might want to check this with one of the Far Cry games in that case. Those actually use asset caching in VRAM, e.g. FC5 allocates up to 15GB during cutscenes on my RTX 4090, but it's happy with just up to 9GB on my GTX 1080Ti at highest settings.
Also keep in mind that Starfield is basically an Xbox port to PC, therefore you can pretty much expect it not using more than 6GB RAM if your system is memory constrained.
@@DawidDoesTechStuffplease test it with any 4gb vram card as well, when you get around to it, and thank you for the quality content!
SSD helps a lot. My friend has laptop with just 4GB of RAM and SSD but it felt incredibly snappy. Altough I also felt Windows chewing up that SSD with it's memory swapping operations
You have to test it with Chrome running in the background. Honestly and considering how many games have multiple monitors, more tests should include some standard apps running in the background while gaming. Or running UA-cam while gaming, or even while streaming.
I mean if you only have 8gb you wouldn't leave chrome open while playing games
@@AirCatcher i can confirm, i have been there lmao
Absolutely agree, running only the game and msi afterburner to test RAM is nonsense. I usually have 10gb of RAM in use when I even turn on the game.
@@daniil3815 those are the sacrifices you make with only 8GB, of course it’ll crash with Chrome open in the background. Mines used to all the time before I upgraded to 16GB.
@@AirCatcherI do that....I listen to youtube videos while running games at windowed mode for smooth multitasking. I have 12GB of RAM....it is fine, no stutter as well.
I watch Dawid Does Tech Stuff for the comedy, but this time I was completely blown away by the science. Can we give a moment of appreciation for Dawid? Not even LTT and other channels in the millions of users have found out what Dawid discovered in this video, at least to my knowledge. Possibly even the professionally done Marques Brownlee channel with phones. Amazing work by Dawid. I'm speculating that game developers deliberately tweak their programs so they run nearly as well on weak hardware systems as they do on strong hardware systems. Or as another viewer wrote, maybe the VRAM compensates. Weird. I hope LTT does something to explain this after a hat tip to Dawid for discovering the phenomena.
Around halfway through the video I was thinking, “wait, this is actually informative.”
Digital foundry did video about 4 vs 8 gig of VRAM and they came to conclusion that ram is very important when there are no VRAM left
8GB of RAM used to be enough not that long ago. Also like others already pointed out, Windows creates about the same amount of virtual RAM on the System Drive, which these days is usually a fast nvme SSD.
Dawid is in the very small circle where I have to watch ALL videos.. such an original personality
A good example of why DDU is one of the first few troubleshooting methods before going to graphics card changes
Another game that pretty regularly goes above 16 gigs of ram for me is hunt showdown, and when I had 16 gigs it was only using 10-12 iirc. Could be placebo, but in that case it did feel like it gave me more fps.
I also thought that was the case with Tarkov but hey, if it feels better than does help. 👍
Unlike what people like to meme, the game actually is optimized. It will grab more ram when its available, and dump assets when it can't.
Because it recognizes there are ram limits, it will actively adapt and there will be some extra loading because of it. Occasionally fps may spike because of that extra disk processes because of less ram
You didn't need to go DDR4 just to achieve 8GB. You can limit the amount of memory Windows can use through msconfig.
Can you do the same for VRAM?
I have 32gb and I never max it out unless I’m doing some crazy virtualization. I have enough to run a game, a virtual machine, and browse the internet all at the same time if I wanted
Perfect video to show to my friends that constantly try to argue that you need 32G of RAM for gaming.
You do if you play modded Cities Skylines!
Yea except these results would be different if he had chrome, discord, Spotify, rgb software, and whatever other bloatware normal users overlook running in the background. It’s definitely not necessary but nice to have, especially since ram is pretty affordable nowadays. For a budget rig you could pick up 32 gb of ddr4 3600 cl18 silicon power ram for like $37.
As others have pointed out, when you start running several Chrome tabs with UA-cam or streaming open on another monitor then the usage jumps a lot.
@@schassismx3115did you miss the part in the video where he did all of that with only 8 gigabytes in the computer and it worked just fine?
@@theoneneo5024you should watch the video again because in the ladder quarter of the video he does specifically that, even points out he had 30 Firefox tabs open and it made no difference
You can dedicate RAM to your iGPU by using a custom BIOS which you can do by using rufos, a USB and some other stuff. There's UA-cam videos on how to do that and I recommend trying it out. I've done it for my Ryzen 7 5700u which has a Radeon RX Vega 8 iGPU.
in certain games my monitor also flickers which I found was caused by having adaptive sync enabled, I even noticed the flickers on Starfield which was fixed by disabling freesync.
I thought it was something like that, but I had adaptive sync turned off in the games I tested.
I noticed flickering when playing PS5 games at "40fps" settings with ARR on. Most monitors can only ARR to a certain fps before having issues and cause it to flicker like that. I hate it.
The mobo on my prebuilt accepts 64 GB of RAM----I'm not trying to send men to the moon or change the space-time continuum, so not sure why I would need that
You should have tested the amount of time it takes to lauch and relaunch a game as well as load and reload a map/level. Having less RAM means less of the file system is cached. I don't think it would make much of a difference with a nvme ssd, but I'd think that someone with only 8GB of RAM would be more likely to be running off a sata ssd or a mechanical drive.
you know Dawid's hit the big time when he does component swaps before DDU'ing.
Haha!! In my defence, I forgot that I had an AMD GPU in this system before.
I suspect having lower RAM won't affect *regular* performance that much, but it will increase the frequency of frame dips (reflected by the drastically lower 1% FPS). Ideally you'd want to either graph the FPS over time and compare how many dips there are among the different configurations, or get it numerically by... something like the second derivative of FPS/time?
It didn't change because he was using a 12gb VRAM card, the same testing on a 4/6/8gb card you'd see a difference
My mans really let the hairs grow and I love it
Rebar was enabled in the latest Nvidia drivers for 30/40 series, nice 5-10% performance uplift!
This is a good benchmark, saving this one. Thanks.
The games worked fine because of the swap file, if you disable it many games wont launch with 8gb, also if u put it in a slower drive (hdd or a sata ssd) it will probably reduce the performance
even sata SSD would be just fine most of the time they hit 500mb/s even with newer drives maybe with no Dram since it uses system ram as a cache
Haha had this happen on linux, 8gigs, now i got even more swap than the amount of ram just 9.5gigs.
Games nowadays benefit or even require an SSD. Even if it needs to go back and forth between volatile and non-volatile storage, at least it no longer has to wait for a slow mechanical hard drive to keep up.
Try 8GB dual channel again but with the games on an HDD.
Try to set your monitor's brightness to 100% with monitor's contrast to 50% and see if the flickering is still there.
As for RAM, a bit surprised myself. I do tend to have at least 100s tabs open in Opera (up to a couple of thousand) which after a while it tends to eat up a bit of RAM, but since the rest of my machine is almost 9yo now, I tend to close it when gaming demanding games.
Perhaps you could try with some video editing in the background, but I guess no one in their right mind would do that if they knew they had only 8GB of RAM and trying to play RAM hungry games.
That flickering has been a known problem with G-sync since forever, especially when you enable it for windowed applications as well as exclusive fullscreen ones. G-sync was designed assuming that whatever it's displaying is refreshing as fast as possible and doesn't really know what to do when the focused application doesn't regularly refresh it's graphics output. If some window you have open is refreshing just below the minimum native refresh rate, the g-sync module in the monitor gets REALLY confused, and that's when you see that flickering. (tl;dr - flickering means turn off windowed g-sync)
I mean he could try it that way but nobody in their right mind would run video rendering software while gaming at the same time.
@@Xerou Eh, I do it all the time with less demanding games (for example Fallout 3, or 2D games), and I used to do it even back when I had my quad core Q or E something something. (bad memory). And my computer now kinda sucks for 2023 (i7 5960X, GTX 1660 Super). Of course I have 64GB of RAM in quad channel, but still even before it was possibly depending on the game.
Redo the test using a sata SSD. My guess is the nvme 2 ssds are so damn fast that they are basically as fast as ram in those situations.
I'm actually surprised how few people mention nvme SSD. Some have noted ssd vs HDD but the speed difference between nvme SSD and SATA SSD are huge. Roughly 10x (500mbs vs 5000mbs)
Retest this with a SATA SSD and there will be a huge difference.
It seems the most important thing for gaming in terms of RAM is having dual channel for more bandwidth to the cpu and low latency rather than just more capacity. Which most of us already knew it's just some people like snobbing it up to justify their 64gb of ram. I've seen people unironically say 32gb is not enough for "future proofing" whatever that means
Was chatting with someone on Facebook who said that 32 GB of RAM is the minimum he would ever consider for gaming. 🙄
(Currently have 8 GB of single stick RAM in my aging desktop, next on the upgrade path).
A few games can actually easily fill up 64 gigs of Ram. Cities Skylines being the prime example. Use all DLCs and load in a bunch of mods and graphical assets from the Workshop and you get "out of memory" messages with 32 gigs very, very easily. So you better have 64 gigs if you want to go crazy with mods and assets there. Can't wait to see if Cities Skylines 2 will be the same ram eating monster.
IL DIVINO: Michelangelo's Sistine Ceiling in VR is another "game" that recommends 64 gigs.
And there's nothing wrong with future proofing. If you're not poor and you can afford it, why not drop in 64 gigs today? There's nothing wrong with it.
@@ShadowAngel1860 Also consider Rimworld, a game that you normally use less than 1gig on the primary storage drive... I've heavily modded it and made it use 40 gigs of memory alone.
Modding gets nuts and 64 is definitely recommended for heavy modders. If you don't, then yeah 32 is great. 16 is bare minimum now, and you will suffer for it.
Thanks for this Dawid. Good video. I had just put 32Gb in my basket for an upgrade from tight latency 16Gb. I needn't bother touching more ram at all. All the best to you!
Before watching this I'm sort of wondering if you haven't tested that like 20 times just this year? We already know the answer.
very interesting result for modern gaming era. thx for the effort
I used to have a monitor that would only flicker when FreeSync was enabled. I know it happens to GSync monitors too. Pretty typical of VA panels.
Starfield still suffering from that TDP bug for Nvidia GPUs. Usually the 4090 to uses about 400 watts of power but for star field it's under 300...
My EVGA 3070 for the win is still using about 70 watts under what it should.
Maybe 8GB kit works just as well as 16 thanks to fast ssd? not only it is fast enough to load stuff in time but also it is used as virtual ram (pagefile).
Its also used as vram
I don't understand why, when I'm playing games my GPU isn't being fully used. It'll be on 40% GPU and 30% CPU. I'll be getting an average of about 70-100 Fps on Low - Max Setting. Idk if it's bottle necked.
I'm using a
GPU - RTX 4070-Ti
CPU - Ryzen 5 5600x
RAM - 16Gb - 3000 MHz
MBD - A320M-A PRO
SSD - Kingston SA400S37480g (I'm running windows 10 off it)
HDD - Toshiba HDWD110
I run my games at 1440p 165hz on a single Monitor.
All my drivers and stuff are all up to date also.
appreciated
I'm guessing because your running the tests @ 1440p, it might not be stressing the CPU as much. Interested to see the same test @ 1080p and see what happens.
high fps (?)
It would be the same. As long as the date required fits in the memory its going to be fine.
Why would you think less resolution scale would indicate less performance? What!?!?!? 😂😂😂
My guess is that while some may RECOMMEND 16GB of more, they may all mostly play with 8GB and if there is extra RAM needed, perhaps it re-adjusts the graphics load to allow the video card to perhaps handle a bit more processing that the RAM otherwise would perhaps. So for example, texture data or player movement, although maybe the video card does handle all of this. But my guess is that 16GB or higher probably assumes you have other stuff running in the background, and that the OS will consume 4GB just by itself.
I’m glad you done this video, I’m just about to upgrade from 32GB DDR5 to 64GB for absolutely no reason😂😮💨
Play Anno 1800 and have 100k population. I had at the later stages 28GB ram usage, and I didn't even got close to 100k, and a big fleet. It depends on the game you play. Shooters and games where the "playfield" is static don't use much RAM and your fine with 16GB. Play any builder game and 32GB will not be enough.
I have 64GB because when I bought it there was not much difference in prices between that kit and 32GB known dual rank kit and at least at that time with 64GB DDR4 there wasn't risk of being single rank. I thought it would be overkill, but lately I have been hoping I would have even more because I have been running out of ram 😄 I use virtual machines and lately I have discovered how useful ram drive is in some cases, so those (and tab hoarding) explains the need for more, not gaming.
Unless you're working for nasa, such an overkill for your pc
@@jponz85 nope, as I said play Anno 1800 and have 150k population, you easy will use 30GB Ram.
@@berndkemmereit8252 yea ok dude.... suuuuure
It really goes to show how good modern operating systems are at managing RAM. They compress and swap uncommonly used pages, saving tons of memory. Fast storage can help make swap so fast that its barely perceptible when data is swapped. Maybe if you tried 8GB of RAM on an HDD instead of an SSD it would make more of a difference.
Now, I don't use MSI Afterburner so I might be wrong, but I'm pretty sure that the "RAM" number is not allocation, but actual "memory usage". There are a lot of terms and nuances here:
- "Allocated memory", called "Committed" by Windows and "Virtual memory" by Linux: represents how much memory the program asked the OS, largely irrelevant number, some programs ask for hundreds of GB of memory and never use it (Chrome on Linux usually asks for upwards of 120GB of memory for example)
- "Used memory", called "Used" by Windows and "Anonymous memory" by Linux: represents how much memory the program is physically using, usually only physically allocated when the program writes to it.
The GPU "MEM" field of afterburner probably refers to memory allocated, while the CPU "MEM" field very probably refers to used memory.
GPU MEM refers to VRAM. Afterburner doesn't list committed memory by default, but it can be added from PerfCounters data sources.
been saying for a while that 32gb is necessary these days. MINIMUM 16 GIGS. But if you want a comfortable experience where you never gotta worry about it without being complete overkill, 32gb is the sweet spot
If anything, Dawid has talked me out of upgrading to 32gb. Based on what we saw here, 16gb will be fine for at least another year or two
Did you not watch the video? Clearly 32 is overkill still.
nah its not. yes i did watch the video. clearly 32gb was the only one producing max ram output without any sacrificing. thats fine, you can run games where youre sacrificing ram, you might not be able to see why but youre dropping something somewhere. ill keep playing on my 32gig and never worrying about any of this bs lol@@TheCudder4life
another year isnt good enough for me lol if it was good for another 3-5 sure. but if your saying in 1 year your probably going to have to upgrade ur ram, and it already doesnt output max ram capabilities then why not just have 32 and be comfortable knowing youre good for the next 5 years. its like $20@@Rhino4272
@ayeimjustabackup There are no discernable differences between 16 and 32. The next time I upgrade, it will be to DDR5. 32 is a waste for gaming at this point
Windows is really good at RAM allocation. The more you have the more stuff will be allocated to the physical RAM, when you game with just 8GBs then most of Windows stuff is thrown to the swap memory so all game assets can be loaded to the RAM memory
I wonder if the games are using your Hard drive as RAM storage when your only at 8GB of ram, so maybe see what happens if you use a mechanical drive instead of an SSD drive.
if i'm correct it should write some RAM data onto the drive as a cache but idk how to describe it
@@lukasvincourcz7043 yup. Seems like a lot of people mention what i said as well. Its alot less noticeable with nvme drives though with how quick read and writes are.
FYI never think about getting a single channel RAM build, I just upgraded my PC from 16 single channel to 32 dual channel (just to be clear I never had RAM size issues so the difference didn't affect performance).
After the upgrade I literally went from 30 FPS that drops to 20 on Resident Evil 4 Remake to being a constant 60 on higher graphics settings for example. In emulation too, I went from running most Switch games at their native 30 FPS cap to being able to play at a modded 60 FPS (before, it used to be at 30-40 FPS at best).
Honestly there's no reason for any modern system to be running single channel RAM, unless you're reselling scavenged e-waste Dells on eBay as "gaming computers". Especially with good quality DDR4 RAM being so cheap and plentiful right now, and even DDR5 isn't that much of a bank breaker.
I know 8gb of ram is fine for some modern games, while it'll have a hard time with other modern games
So I am also wondering if you are using ssd's in all your examples? Consider maybe swapping to hdd and see what happens? Im wondering if the page swaps have become very good on ssds that it becomes unnoticed, whereas if you use classic hdd, you'll see a difference. Something to test and do a part 2?
Claim your “here within an hour” ticket right here🏆
Claimed
claimed
Lol
Thanks boss
Here within 5 mins
i have had 32k ram as MINIMUM since 2014 or 2013? when did 4790k come? it still tugging along at 5ghz on my secondary comp, 8bm? is that not 2001 or something? windows xp black edition I think i had 8gb? or was it 12? it was when rampage extreme had TRI channel right? so 4x3?
The reason why you're seeing what you're seeing is because the boot SSD is being used as a page file when the amount of physical RAM is not enough - on superfast NVME SSDs this isn't so much of a problem, but on slower SSDs (such as earlier NVME's and SATA drives) it is more noticeable, and ESPECIALLY SO if your boot disk is a mechanical hard drive.
On a HP 15-ac153sa with Windows 7 and 16GB DDR3, the system completely chugs due to the lack of RAM and using the hard drive as a page file.
With all of this in mind, I have a Corsair 128GB DDR4 kit in my desktop PC and I haven't looked back.
Isnt this AIO placement a bad choice ? 5:42 ? Shouldnt tube be mounted down to allow for proper waterflow ?
2:19 😂 I wasn’t ready for that 😂
My guess is that the pc is using the pagefile system to make up for less available RAM allocation
That's exactly what's happening
When mounting AIO radiators vertically, the tubes need to be at the bottom, not the top. If the tubes are on the top, the small amount of air in the system will constantly recirculate in the pump, causing cavitation and damage over time. It'll also cause the pump to be noisy.
Yeah, it's def using swap (pagefile) with the lower memory configs (like others have said). I currently have a single 8GB stick of DDR4 and I'm using 83% of RAM and 86% of SWAP (two web browsers, Discord, Chatterino). I *almost* don't notice having a low amount of RAM even with a game open on top of everything else because of the pagefile running off of my NVMe drive. 16GB of RAM is def the minimum config I'd recommend these days for even a basic system imho (to prevent overuse of the system drive), with 32GB being a nice sweet spot cause RAM isn't all that expensive. Interesting video for sure!
Did you try turning off the Page file in Windows? I’ve found that can really do some heavy lifting in disguising how much RAM your system needs.
Try Anno 1800 and start building and watch your Ram go up. I had my system Pull 28GB and I didn't even have a massive fleet and over 150k population. At the start you can run it on 8GB, but pretty fast it is not enough.
Also having a good cpu helps with less ram. If you have an average cpu or mid range u won’t be able to run these games or if at all smoothly. So this title is misleading
Both those cards have 12GB VRAM so they can keep all game assets loaded there. Try with 8GB (3070 Ti or 7600) or 6GB (2060 or 5600 XT) and I'll bet you see a bigger hit to FPS with 8GB (maybe even 16GB?) even though those are lower performance GPUs.
Nope same results here too
Page files do magic
Same results where?
I was playing Starfield as I watched this, then I went and looked at the Dark Base Pro and coughed when I saw the price LOL. Great Video Dawid!
Something that is vastly underrepresented in the testing space is city/factory builders. City skylines and Factorio both come to mind. Maybe not the most flashy of games, but both are massive databases the need the RAM equivalent of a 4090 to die slower. After all the factory will expand to fill the resources of the improving system.
I know Factorio has a sizeable technical community that has some bench marking maps.
Most ram I’ve ever seen used on a game was the original WarZone and it used just over 24gb at 4K high settings. Madness.
In my case - GOW 2018 used up to 26+ Gigs, due to memory "leak" bug, before latest patch. 😮
Todd Howard: upgrade your PC
Dawid : hold my 8RAM stick
I was really looking Forward to this Video
Co sidering I've binged almost your entire channel, nice to see a new video 😅
The thing with RAM amount is that it dosn't have any impact on performance until you have not enough of it and there ARE applicatication and/or games that require more then 16GB of ram like super heavily modded mincraft with hd textures and shaders, super modded mincraft will actually crash with an out of memory exception if you try to load a shader unless you have 16GB of ram allocated, not in your system allocated so 16GB is not enogh for that. It also depends on how much stuff you have running in the background becouse if you got just barly enough ram to run the game it will suffer when chrome running in the background. Also once your rams close to full windows will automatically start to page out background application, which is why you never see 100% ram usage.
Fun fact. I have a Legion 5 Laptop with a RTX 3060 with 6gb vram and originally 16gb of ram (1gb of shared GPU memory to the VEGA 8 of the 5800h).
Last of us would stutter and average under 40fps at 1080p mid~high and crash in a few minutes. I thought VRAM was the issue, but after I upgraded to 32gb of RAM, the game run flawlessly at 50+ fps most of the time, with full VRAM allocation (mixed mid-high settings, high texture for chracacter models). Few VRAM memory offloads some assets (not all) to the system ram. My 3090 uses far less ram even with higher settings in Last of us than my Notebook.
Ram utilization on my notebook was about 22gb of ram for TLOU
Emulation, DCS and Tarkov are notorious for demading more than 16gb of RAM. Unfortunately 16gb is not enough even with a mid-tier graphic card like the 3060.
Loved the Tarkov benchmarking thank you.
Happy I came across your channel 5 months ago, I've binged watched almost every episode, you got good humor thanks for the quality content 👍
I think this really suggests that Dual Channel but low capacity is a better short term investment for an upgrade to a very budget system than simply getting higher capacity single channel, but these results suggest I might not have seen any immediate increase if I had just gotten a single 16 planning to get a second 16 stick to run dual later like I had considered.
Because I definitely noticed a significant performance increase switching from single 8g to 2x8g on a pre built AMD platform.
My favorite tech channel, great video.
So.... ANY two kits of ram will have the same exact performance if you time them exactly the same?
I was just going to say did you remove the AMD drivers first?
If you use more than one screen and have chrome discord etc open.
Then you can see a benefit with more than 16GB.
When I had 16 GB and used to have games up while doing something else on my second monitor, the system felt way more stuttery.
And I think that has to do with how much windows can cache while prioritizing a game, and thus with more RAM it will feel smoother to transition.
One reason for the stutter with dual monitors could be due to their refresh rates. I see it with many games. My second monitor is a POS and if I bounce from one to another the game gets confused at what refresh rate to run at.
Yeah but then the benefit is being able to run Chrome, not any benefit to the game
Thank goodness Be Quiet also has the 601 series for those of us who aren't prepared to spend $330 on a case...but for those of us who are...uuunnnfff yes that's the one to get. So I definitely run DDU with a GPU change, every time, even staying with the same chipset maker, it makes all the difference. And as far as RAM amount, I notice when I have 16GB of RAM installed, my computer uses 12-13GB while gaming. When I have 32GB installed it hovers around 15-16GB, so I think 16GB works for my use case with the games I play but I can see where 32GB should be the "new" standard. 16GB is fine for most people, and 8GB is tolerable if you're trying to save the extra $30-$40 to get other better bits. Every dollar counts in a build because you'll be stuck with it for awhile unless you collect PC parts like...some of us...*sideeye*...but I don't know ANYTHING about that.
What a beautiful case. Glad i picked up the same one. Im still running 16gb of 3600 ram and haven't run into a single issue.
Still rocking grandma's mousemat there. Top stuff.
Tarkov basicly needs 32GB and pretty fast one, on streets I use up over 25 gig, but offline raids tend to use less ram I think.
Like others have said I think it's the NVME SSD. I had a laptop with 4gb memory and it wasn't that bad most of the time, because it had an NVME. If you used a HDD or a Sata SSD I think it would be far more noticable.
Dang. That rug mouse pad is so rad
That's surprise.... while having 16GB RAM is good advice it's clearly not must-have, as long as it's not set up by Dell or HP. Also, where did you get that awesome rug (on video around 2:50)?
So 96GB or 128GB was not required for gaming then?
fun and informative, good work Dawid
I have 16gb in my system and to be honest i keep an eye on my usage and find that it is generally plenty. Even web browsing i have to open more tabs then is practical and its still plenty. I dont see myself jumping to 32gb any time soon
Amazing discoveries, Dawid.
This is actually very scientific.
Is this ddr5? I run tarkov on 64gb of ddr4 at 3600mhz. It allocates up to 34gb. I guess I have discord up with 2 or 3 friends steams going on discord. I'd also say, your not loading into an online raid. Not near as much real time memory needed to keep track of online only entities.
I don't get it? I'm running a sapphire 6800xt as my main gaming 1440p monitor and I have my old Rog strix 1060 running my 3 smaller1080p monitors and have no driver issues.
All I know for sure is that with the dirt cheap pricing on ddr4 ram, I upgraded to 64gb's and I have been experiencing more stable 0.1% lows and fewer random crashes.
I must state that I simply turned on XMP and enabled the 3600mhz 18-22-22-22-42 profile on my x570 Asus-P prime board, but in my experience, more ram = more stability.
But you probably cant see that far or in low resolution
I think the biggest part of "you need more ram" is just : do you want to have stuff open in the background or do you not care.
I was struggling with 16GB on Warzone because i kept my 300 Firefox tabs open, discord, steam, and more stuff
It was eating all of it, i had to upgrade to 32GB to stop having a slideshow warzone experience. But closing firefox usually let me play with 16GB. Its more convenience than anything else
Warzone is an extreme outlier though. I've been running 16GB for 4 years now (planning an upgrade) and Warzone is the only game where I ran into any kind of memory issues. No other game complained, even with my daily programs (Steam, Discord, VSCode, Chrome, Spotify, and several other miscellaneous windows) open.
And if you try this again with some modest or older gpu???
PS5 and XBSX both have a total of 16gb of memory for everything, with most of that being allocated to VRAM. These games probably need 4-6GB of actual RAM once you have a decent VRAM buffer. You'll probably have problems if you have an 8GB GPU w 8GB RAM because some of the data might start to bleed off to your SSD - though if you have a high speed gen4 SSD, its fast enough to handle minor stuff being dumped off.
I remember joking with coworkers about the 2gb ram requirement for vista it seemed like an insane amount at the time and here we are today
And by the video it seems that we still don't need more than those 2gb
We all seem to forget that windows can dynamically swap out data from memory if swap file is enabled. It should be able to manage most games with just 8gb. As long as you close background tasks
this seems to be a fairly common misconception. speed, CAS, and amount of channels can have an impact on FPS. however, capacity has literally nothing to do with performance, because it only determines a resource pool that will cause windows to just crash itself, the program, or not not allow programs to start. it's funny, too, because windows allocates more trash to RAM the more RAM it has. a freshly restarted windows system with 16GB idling will use 4-ish GB while the same system restarted with a 32GB kit swap will use 7-ish. 64GB is probably more. basically, if you don't use it you don't need it, but the latency, frequency, and amount of channels affects performance significantly.
Most games over-allocate RAM if it's available, just in case they need it. The games also don't use all the RAM all the time so can swap out a lot of it for a lot of the time. The biggest slow down you'll see is when loading assets, but with todays high speed SSDs (being used for swap space) that's not going to make much of a difference either.
I'm surprised no one pointed out, or that Dawid doesn't mention that just cause a certain amount of RAM shows up as "allocated" to the game, it doesn't mean the game is actually using all that RAM. That's why when he goes with less RAM, the software proportionally allocates less, but it still performs the same. Cause at higher allocations it wasnt using all of it anyway.
I would still not feel comfortable with anything less than 16GB of dual channel RAM on a desktop...
11:10 U forgot there is a game called "Minecraft" which loves eating a Ton of ram (for some reasons just crank up the render distance)