Question How important is RAM for videogames?

[spardason]

Hello!

So i have a ryzen 2400g with a GTX 1060 6 GB and 8 ram ddr 4 dual channel (it's a budget build)

So anyway, i've been testing many games and they all run perfectly on high settings (i don't want to touch ultra settings), games such as RE2 remake, witcher 3, battlefield 1, total war warhammer 2, fallout 4 and many more, all ran from 50 fps min to 90 fps

But everyone keep recommending me to upgrade to 16 GB ram... so my question is...how important is to have 16 GB? how will it affect my games if they run so well right now? and sorry for my english

 

[13thmonkey]

If you are only using 6Gb now then 16GB will not do anything for you, as soon as you start using 8.1GB your performance should drop off.

If you are careful about what you run in the background, you'll be fine.

 

[korv]

As long as you don't use too high settings you should be fine.

Edit: I was thinking about the vram, my mistake.

 

[spardason]

If you are only using 6Gb now then 16GB will not do anything for you, as soon as you start using 8.1GB your performance should drop off.

If you are careful about what you run in the background, you'll be fine.

Oh no, 6 GB is VRAM, i have 8 gb in RAM, and what do you mean by performance drop off when using 8,1? sorry, im a noob

 

[spardason]

As long as you don't use too high settings you should be fine.

Edit: I was thinking about the vram, my mistake.

Is that talking about my whole build? or only RAM?

 

[korv]

Is that talking about my whole build? or only RAM?

Sorry about that. I was thinking of your graphic cards vram. You should be fine if you don't have a lot of programs or website on while you're playing.

 

[13thmonkey]

Oh no, 6 GB is VRAM, i have 8 gb in RAM, and what do you mean by performance drop off when using 8,1? sorry, im a noob

So if you are using less than 8GB of ram then increasing it to 16GB will make no difference, for example using 6GB. However as soon as programs try to use more, like 8.1 in total (although in reality the limit might be around 7.5GB) then you start to use the page file, which is x100-x1000 times slower than RAM, at this point it will slow your system down a bit. It'll be a little slowdown as with only a bit of extra ram being used windows will cleverly put memory that isn't being used (background tasks etc.) onto the page file. But there will come a point where that can't happen any more. Then game performance will suffer, maybe at around 9GB of usage.