I am still running 4gb of system ram and playing all of the latest AAA titles with locked 60 fps at 1080p most of the time. It's a 970 overclocked on a 2600k at 4.6 so no slouch but no monster either. I have had zero stuttering issues and no apparent ram starvation symptoms in any way. Perhaps I am not playing the right games ? I was never one to have a million browser tabs open and keep a tidy system with minimal startup items despite having an SSD. Old habits die hard I guess. Still, shouldn't I be having issues ?
SSD is your answer, if your paging to that the issue will be far lessened. But you'll be running out of ram in larger modern games for sure
What games do you play? I loaded a quick game of BF4 and within 30 seconds or so I was using 6GB of RAM
Yup, Ram usage while playing Shadow of Chernobyl with Zone Reclamation project and Autumn Aurora 2.1 pops it easy to 4GB.
Battlefield 4 was never an issue in fact I got bored with it and uninstalled it since it took up so much space. I am playing Shadow of Mordor on ultra at 1080p and it's pegged 60 almost all of the time with textures on ultra which claims to need a 6gb card (not true). Maybe a lot of games will use the ram when it is there but perhaps it isnt really needed a lot of the time. I dunno. I can only say I have no issues. This is more of a curiosity for me than anything and besides, ram is so cheap it's a non issues to upgrade.
i dont know about you but many people had issues before they upgraded to 8gb or more, 4gb just isnt enough... games will use 6gb or more..
2 sticks and overclock on the ram as well. Not that it matters much. There is one game that does stutter but only for the 1st 5-10 seconds at the very 1st play and that is Dying Light. It's not using near 4 gigs though. Can just an SSD (and an old one at that) be hiding this issue well enough ? I consider myself to be frame rate obsessed so I do notice any dips and I really just don't see issue. Even using DSR i might drop to lower rates as one would expect but nothing that appears to be a ram starvation issue. Windows 8.1 BTW. Had to drop OC to 4.6 from my sig of 4.7 due to 0124 errors after two years and 1/2 years of running 1.41v. No issues at 1.37 and 4.6 though. Oh and no games are running from the SSD. Only the OS and pagefile settings are default.
I just finished playing Witcher 3 for 6-7 hours straight. AB reported 9GB system ram usage. There is some leak obviously (after many hours) but still ram usage is high. Its not only a handful of games that need more ram, there is plenty now.
BF4 multiplayer will cripple system ram, even BF3, GTA4, GTA5, Dying Light, Assassins Creed Unity, BatmanAK apparently, etc. Imo 4GB is really borderline low now, kind of like 1-2GB was when 4GB ram became more mainstream and recommended in general. Even 8GB is now becoming that 1-2GB in uber "next gen" games or upcoming next year..
I have 32GB RAM. I was using a RAM drive Playing Star Citizen and BF4 loading quickly. With the RAM drive turned off, and little open on Windows 10 my PC is chosing to use 3.9 of 31.9 GB RAM and about a 5GB page file allocated. To me that points to a real world recomendation of at least 8GB RAM and 16GB is probably a sweet spot for most new builds/serious upgrades.
There's always debates about this and people saying 6GB or less can be enough for games. Yes, because of pagefile
Insufficient RAM will give excessive page file usage. You are giving your HDD/SSD a big workout. There will be performance drop but if the user is OK with this then the question is are you happy with the extra wear and tear on your computer? If you use your computer a lot with heavy page file usage then it is more likely to fail prematurely.
I just like to have everything loaded in to ram whenever possible. Got lots of programs in startup that use up to 4gb just when my windows is idle. (media server, upnp decoding for my chromecast, steam, origin, uplay, diskeeper constantly cleaning my media drives etc etc. ) And windows 10 handle the extra ram just fine. I do not see any good reason to not have lots of ram. The ddr3 is dirt dirt cheap and ddr4 is coming down in price.
I also use a ramdrive when I play ARMA 2/3 and GTA games. My next build will be 32 GB or more ram even though I do have a SSD now.
I bet in newer games quite a bit of information is being paged, you just aren't noticing any issues because it's loading from an SSD. If you moved your pagefile to a mechanical drive you would notice a difference in load times and game performance with only 4GB of ram in newer games.
I just finally upped my main rig to 16GB as I thought 8GB was getting kind of iffy. My other 5 gaming rigs have 8GB as well. It's mainly about having the extra head room. I was running 4GB in one them for awhile recently though and it did just fine. I couldn't tell the difference. As mentioned, these days, any new build should probably get 16GB at minimum unless the budget is super tight. DDR3 is just so cheap now. DDR4 will get there too eventually.
I've done a test myself doing this and yes. Game loaded uses 8GB commit charge in total (system included). Limiting the system to 4GB of RAM and pagefile means there's another 4GB on the HDD. The game ran like rubbish.