Are we likely to ever need more than 16 GB RAM on this generation of PCs?

Deleted member 209350

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Deleted member 209350

The more RAM you have, the more Windows will use, modern games/applications too. That's the point.

Yeah i find that stupid, just because you have more, more gets used up? where's the sense in that
 

Deleted member 209350

D

Deleted member 209350

16gb at 4000+mhz seems much better to me than 32gb at 2133mhz tbh.

16 is more than enough to have everything you need open, but if you want to future proof just get 32. If your motherboard has 4 slots, then its probably best to use 2 up to make 16gb first, and if you need in the future you can get another 2
 
Man of Honour
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Depends on what you do surely! For gaming I rarely see above 16gb or so in use. For lightroom, photoshop, other creative stuff, VM's and work, 16gb for me isn't nearly enough and would get eaten in no time at all. For that reason 64gb of 3466mhz was what I settled with and I have seen that completely full plenty of times. Would love to upgrade further to 128gb but it's seriously pricey. Even 64gb was nearly 1k at the time I bought mine so I imagine 128gb would really be pushing the wallet.
 
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16GB is a bit tight for Cities:Skylines. It'll use 12GB+ no problems.

I have to admit this is true. I've just checked loading my 90k pop city with only the 25 tile mode, and system RAM usage is 12.5 GB with some junk running in the background. Though I did come from 12 GB on my old system and on loading the same city, it never occurred to me RAM might be a factor in performance.

City Skylines is monstrously inefficient anyway though. I have total CPU use of 24% with it running (with other junk going on elsewhere) and a GPU usage of about 45% with all eye candy turned on at 3440x1440, and I'm getting about 25 fps. Apparently it's not much better on Threadripper/2080 Ti systems; the engine is simply not capable of utilising the hardware thrown at it and always performs like garbage.
 
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As people have stated above, the system will use RAM if available but the key is the corresponding performance impact of reaching capacity.

Using 12+GB out of 16GB does not mean that your system is about to grind to a crippling halt.
 
Soldato
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RAM is faster than conventional disk storage, it gets the data to the CPU faster. Ideally you want as much memory caching as possible without hogging all your memory should you need to launch another program

I manage about 1000 windiws servers our 16 /24gb citrix servers only ever use 12 to 14gb ram the same with our file servers the only servers that use over 16gb are database / heavy app servers..our 16gb dev workstations raraly exceed 50% ram usage ...
 
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Think it's worth necoring this thread as I see a lot of folks now running 32 GB of RAM, and the scope was "would we ever need more than 16 GB before DDR5" with talk of 2023-2025 considerations.

In Cyberpunk 2077, my RAM usage hovers around 10 GB of my 16 GB.

My VRAM usage (or should I say, 'allocation' as I've now discovered), is usually ~7 GB (on highest texture settings at 3440x1440) on my 8 GB RX 5700 XT.

What does throw a spanner into the works is that the old idea of the 'can't handle more than 2 sticks of DRAM properly' Ryzen memory controller, has been replaced by 'can get up to ~5-7% performance average uplift running 4x sticks due to a pseudo-quad channel effect on the latest Ryzen processors.

Is this the only good reason to upgrade RAM size amount for those of us on 2 x 8 GB sticks? Or is 32 GB seen as actually being useful anytime still before 2023-2025 / DDR5?

I honestly considered just going with 2 x 4 GB sticks and upgrading with another 2 x 4 GB later back when RAM prices were overly inflated to cut costs. Starting to think that might have been the smart thing to do afterall.

Also, eyeing up the latest video card upgrades, I can't help but find it strange that I may end up with more VRAM than my system RAM.
 
Soldato
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Just an idea. You could setup a 16GB RAM drive if you have 32GB and install some stuff on there which would improve loading speeds significantly.
 
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Just an idea. You could setup a 16GB RAM drive if you have 32GB and install some stuff on there which would improve loading speeds significantly.

With a 500 GB SATA SSD and a 1 TB NVME m.2 drive , I personally find loading speeds negligible, or even frustratingly too fast if it means I totally miss a 'loading screen tip / lore' that developers never envisioned could fly by too quickly to be read.
 
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