Question how many more years 32(16X2) GB RAM would be relevant for 1440p gaming?

[eziowar]

Sorry if it's a stupid question, but can someone plz give a rough estimate of how many more years 32(16X2) GB DDR5 RAM would be relevant for 1440p gaming? this is important cause i'm deciding if i'll buy ASRock B650M HDV/M.2 or not cause it has only 2X ram slots.

 

[CountMike]

Sorry if it's a stupid question, but can someone plz give a rough estimate of how many more years 32(16X2) GB DDR5 RAM would be relevant for 1440p gaming? this is important cause i'm deciding if i'll buy ASRock B650M HDV/M.2 or not cause it has only 2X ram slots.

That's anybody's guess but tendency is to use more and faster RAM. Adding more RAM even if you have empty slots for it is hit and miss most of time so you are looking at replacing it instead if you have to upgrade. If you are planning to keep your system more than 4-5 years you may be better off doubling to 64GB now, After that time it's more than likely DDR6 will become standard as it is now in GPUs and DDR5 may become worthless like DDR3 and even DDR4 is now.

 

[hotaru.hino]

The best we can go off of is what system requirements looked like over the years. But keep in mind, these don't necessarily mean that the game will consume up to that much, but you should probably have that much if you want to run other things you'd normally do.

• 16GB recommended started showing up around 2021, but it wasn't starting to be required until 2023
• 12GB recommended started showing up around 2019, but it wasn't starting to be required until 2021
• 8GB recommended started showing up around 2013, but it wasn't starting to be required until 2015
• 4GB recommended started showing up around 2011, but it wasn't starting to be required until 2013

This is just poking around with games that were considered AAA quality of the time. But as you can see, while the jump from 4 to 8GB being required was kinda short, the jump from 8GB to 16GB required took a lot longer. Just out of curiosity, I wanted to see if there are any games that recommend more than 16GB of RAM, and so far Forspoken is one of them that recommends 24GB. Judging by this video I found, the game seems to use up to 12GB of RAM, and in that person's computer, up to 19.5GB total was used.

There were articles floating around that Returnal recommends 32GB, but the official requirements from Sony's site says 16GB unless you want the 4K configuration... which doesn't make sense to me other than Sony's expecting a lot of VRAM swapping. (EDIT: I found a few videos showing Returnal and real time RAM usage and the game hovered around 12-14GB of RAM usage, assuming the value in the overlay they had was just for the game).

Ultimately though, this is kind of a moot point. Get what makes sense to you now and worry about the future if it actually happens. I've seen a lot of testimonials of people who bought an HEDT platform (e.g., Threadripper) because they thought they would use the extra CPU horsepower in the future. That never actually happened.

 

[eziowar]

Btw i'll also gonna stream my gaming on twitch using OBS, video editting etc will that require more than 32gb ram?

 

[hotaru.hino]

Btw i'll also gonna stream my gaming on twitch using OBS, video editting etc will that require more than 32gb ram?

Streaming doesn't take up that much RAM because the data it generates is gone within seconds, either to the cloud or saved on your drive.

 

[35below0]

A few games exist that can push over 16Gb easily but not close to 32Gb. But in the next 3-4 years i think there will be a few games monstrous enough to even break 32Gb. Not many though. Maybe by 2030 32Gb is no longer enough but there is no rush today.

Esp. not since 32Gb sticks are typically not as fast as 16Gb sticks. So if you grab 64Gb today, you have to either buy a very very expensive kit or buy slow RAM, more than half of which you will not use for years.

 

[Viking2121]

Well considering over the past 20 years ram requirements haven't been to drastic, going from 16GB to 32GB is double I'd suspect for the majority of users it would be plenty, you'd be moving to a different system or 2 before you see games needing more than 32GB or ram, It'll happen, but we have a little while before that point.

But if something changes with how some future games access the memory, then maybe we might see the need for 32 sooner than later, But thats anyone's guess right now.

 

[hotaru.hino]

To add more thoughts into this, things that I see that could use more RAM, such as a larger interactive world, more NPCs, etc. tend to be limited by rapidly diminishing returns in terms of adding value to the actual game play.

But then again I don't know how something like Cyberpunk 2077 is using that much RAM when on a surface level the world doesn't seem more alive to me than say Skyrim or GTA V.

 

[35below0]

I'll just throw in that before 64Gb is needed, a 2x24 kit for a total of 48Gb would do. They're faster than 2x32Gb kits as well.