These days of ridiculous RAM prices are enough to make a PC nerd cry. The past few years, I could never understand those going to 64GB or higher. It just seems like wasting money with no real performance benefit (even before the crazy RAM prices). I’ve got an older MSi Z370 GAMING M5 motherboard and an even older Intel i7-8700k @ 3.7GHz cpu and an RTX 3060 Ti GPU. The RAM I’m using is the Corsair Vengence LPX 32GB (2 x 16GB) DDR4 DRAM 3000MHz. I’m not a mega-gamer, though I do game a bit via Steam, along with some video editing and music creation. 32 GB RAM is more than sufficient. I think, unless you’re a professional gamer on a high-end rig, 32 GB of RAM is the sweet spot.
I have 64GB, I commonly easily reach over 50% of that. My heavily modded Elder Scrolls Skyrim uses up almost 30GB RAM (Even with a 16GB GPU) by itself, but that is full of 4k textures, some 8k textures and even some 16k textures and Photogrammetry textures. For day-to-day use I am always using 20+GB all the time.
There are, of course, exceptions. Yours would be one. But generally speaking, more that 32 GB seems like throwing money out of the window of a moving car.
Minus heavily modded games… just for average day-to-day use, that seems like a hell of a lot. Even with my video editing, music creation, and image creation (along with regular LibreWolfe, email and such), I rarely get above 10 BG.
That’s 100% accurate. But those who require 64 GB or more are in the minority as far as general, day-to-day computer usage, IMHO. Heavy gamers and mega-VM usage will elevate the need for additional RAM.
I mean, power users will always be in the minority. The reality is that people who require 32GB of RAM are also in the minority. That is why very few PCs are sold with 64GB of RAM. 8-16GB PCs are far more common than 32GB.
I don’t really see a point in isolating any of those groups. It isn’t like there is some epidemic going around where most people are buying too much RAM.
I recently downloaded 2013’s Tomb Raider. And despite the graphics seeming outdated in comparison to the latest games, it’s actually decent when turned all the way up, and it was seen as incredible when the game came out.
Irrelevant but also relevant note: This is the only AAA game that I have played in the last 4 years since fully switching to Linux that I could turn all the way up without noticing a performance decline or it straight up nuking itself.
Games, in my opinion, are supposed to take you out of reality and into another world. Games that go out of their way to look realistic (Tomb Raider 2013 was seen as realistic at one point) don’t really allow this (again, in my opinion).
The overall point is: we (collectively) can never be satisfied, even though every advancement we make seemed impossible, or even perfect, at one point. But that’s before something else comes along and says, “Nah, Tomb Raider’s/Crysis/etc. graphics are trash.”
I, for one, would like games, movies, and all digital entertainment to stop requiring more power to enjoy them.
I’m working with just 16GB RAM and 6GB VRAM, btw.
PS: Just look at these requirements for a AAA video game from just over 10 years ago. My VRAM alone could run this.
EDIT: Just thinking how ridiculous GTA 6 is going to be while knowing how much I enjoyed GTA 3 with the pancake feet. Enjoyment is not enhanced by power or speed. It’s entirely about gameplay and story. Ask the dozens of AAA titles that failed because they focused on graphics over actual enjoyment. Or ask the people who were/are sorely disappointed by almost everything that guy who made Rebel Moon puts out.
During the pandemic, I worked so much overtime that I was able to build the machine of my dreams. It’s not been king of the hill for a few years, but for a short period of time (1.5 years) I had basically the best rig money could buy. Still serves me well. It was on my bucket list to build the biggest, baddest machine ever. My wife was magnanimous enough to allow me to do it. But oh, the price tag.
My current rig is as follows:
i9-10980xe (18c/36t)
256GB DDR4-3200 RAM
RTX 3090
42 TB of storage
a 43” 4k TV-turned-into-monitor
a dell 34” 3440x1440 ultrawide monitor.
Will I ever use that much memory? No. although like the other person in this thread, my extremely heavily modded Skyrim also eats up a ton of RAM, and even on the 3090 it’s using 90% of that VRAM. 3-4 VMs all using 32GB of RAM, and back in my Ubuntu w/ ZFS days, that also took a sizeable chunk.
Overkill? There is no question about it. But I was able to check something off of my bucket list. That 3090 will be the last Nvidia card I ever buy (it was an EVGA). It’ll be AMD (or Intel if their cards start to get really good).
Heck, even on this laptop, which has 64GB of RAM, I use it - I have a few VMs running, but nothing like the beast.
In terms of games Skyrim Special Edition is almost the exception, thats back when I modded games to push their limits years ago, around 300GB of mods altogether for Skyrim and edited my own custom patches to get multiple incompatible mods with no official patches working, I done the same with Bethesdas other Elder Scroll and Fallout games (except Fallout 4), but Skyrim is the only one that goes beyond the GPU by any amount but I keep it as it looks stunning and spent many weeks and months testing and perfecting it at the time so it was quite the journey. Otherwise all other games I play don’t even fill the VRAM and I mostly play old games unmodded now and enjoy them just fine. Stardew valley has almost 600 mods and makes my system reach 50+% RAM.
Otherwise some of my image editing can use 10+GB as I like to have a huge history saved. Otherwise I sometimes have virtual machines running and my browsers have a lot of tabs open.
Same here, glad that I bought 64gb ram back then in April. Unfortunately, due to budget constraint I’m unable to get a GPU. With the current situation, not possible at all. Well, I can still live with iGPU.
I bought 4x8GB DDR4 3600 MHz CL 16 (F4-3600C16-8GTZ) from G.Skill in the summer of 2019. For me, it has always been sufficient, except when I used VMs. Today, I hardly do anything with it, and for me, that’s enough for now, as I don’t want to invest any more money in the old platform (AM4). I think I’ll only switch back to AM6 (which will then use DDR6), and that will take some time. Until then, I hope that prices don’t rise any further and nothing breaks down (knock on wood).
With Linux, RAM consumption has also gone down compared to Windows 11 back then.
Edit:
These are the modules because I wanted something without RGB. I also found the bill from back then. The price was 347,79 €.
I bought 64GB for just €150 new…my laptop could handle 64gb ram and 8tb disk space. So when i bought the notebook i already did a max upgrade within a few months.
Thats the first thing i noticed too, that whas the only moment when i thought my 64GB is overkill in linux
Reminds me of this quote: “640K ought to be enough for anyone.”
My PC has 64 GB RAM. I am doing photo editing with high res pictures and sometimes I have several VMs running. And if a second user, like my wife, is logged in in parallel, the RAM consumption goes up too. I frequently see my PC consuming more than 40 GB of RAM.
If you have only a single user PC and you are just doing web browsing and email, you can certainly live with 8-16 GB of RAM. It all depends on what you are doing with your PC.
A couple months ago I actually re-played the game again cause I thought it would be fun to play it again. I even enjoyed myself again even though the graphics are dated compared to newer games now days.
I self host a bunch of apps/games and typically chew up 8gb of memory just on that. I had on order a 9060 but cancelled that and ordered a 9070. Figure might as well upgrade while I can because everything is going up next year.
Doing various things I think the most RAM I have chewed up total is 40gb
I have a 13 years old machine which is still pretty fast and responsive because I bought it with 32GB to begin with. Initially it had HDDs but after some years I changed them to SSDs, and that was a drastic change for the better.
But the prices are what they are (and were) and we have to live with that I guess.
