IS 8GB ram enough ?

[The Paladin]

So I have seen this questions asked a ton of time and have seen a lot of variation on the answers where people say it is or not sufficient, being a stubborn ol man I read bunch of areticles and videos etc etc. then decided tolook closer at my 32GB system and see how it run, and uses the memory I have ont he system

1. Windows 10 1803 Update, running nothing in the background (all auto loads apps are disabled and I load the recourse monitor and I get this little screen.

6,172 MB, so 6.1GB used .. just for windows.
then I launch PUBG (with auto launching of Steam in the background, and start a game (I game in 1080p) and the I snap another recourse monitor screen

9,280MB or 9.3 GB

now if you only have 8GB of ram on your system 1.3GB of that would of become swap files (memory spot using your hard drive space) .

last example
load normally the PC , ASus Fans monitor, Corsair Mouse software, MSi Afterburner for the video card fan, MS antivirus. and open 1 windows of edge browser and stream online television sport channel in 720p, Discord, and finally, a game.. PUBG again for uniformity. And we get ?

10.1GB usage of Ram...
why would you ever want 8GB of ram, and force your SSD/HDD to constantly be swapping 2Gb of files around ..?

get 16GB and never have to deal with it.

 

[gasaraki]

Umm, that's bull. Windows does not need 6GB when nothing is running. My work computer right now has 8GB of ram and it's at 75% usage. I have about 150 processes running. I have FIrefox with 15 tabs running, outlook, IE11 with 3 tabs, PDFs, etc. All this at only 6GB.

I have a gamin laptop with 32GB of ram and it boots up with maybe 10% usage.

 

[why_wolf]

Windows dynamically uses RAM, so if you have more RAM installed it will load more of itself into RAM. If you have less RAM installed it loads less of itself. Example I have 8gb on this rig and its only using 3.2gb of RAM with Chrome and Outlook being the only things open.

 

[WildCard999]

I'm a little bit skeptical, a friend of mine is using Window 10 64-bit with only 4gb of RAM and still can game (BF4/BnS/Dark Souls 3/Division) on lower settings at 1080P without performance issues (well 40-50 FPS but no stuttering).

I'm going to test this on my system which is up to date with Windows 10 updates and has 16gb when I get home.

 

[Zerk2012]

Windows dynamically uses RAM, so if you have more RAM installed it will load more of itself into RAM. If you have less RAM installed it loads less of itself. Example I have 8gb on this rig and its only using 3.2gb of RAM with Chrome and Outlook being the only things open.

To a small degree that is right up to a point.
If you add 8GB more to yours you might see 3.4 with the same things open.

 

[Solandri]

I regularly run Win 7 and 10 in a virtual machine with 2 GB of RAM. Upon boot, Windows uses about 1 GB of RAM, leaving plenty left over for a browser (not too many tabs) and Handbrake. So why_wolf is correct that Windows scales its RAM use depending on how much RAM is available.

The only thing your experiment tells me is that PUBG uses 9.3 GB - 6.2 GB = 3.1 GB of RAM.

 

[CaptainCretin]

What you are seeing is the OS setting up a large chuck of excess RAM as cache memory (A RAMDisk is what we called it in the Amiga days).

On my Win7 system, I have 16GB, of this the OS has currently used 10GB for cache, and left 1.6GB free, so my system is using a grand total of 4.4GB for actual programs, including the OS.

As the PC uses more RAM for programs, the OS progressively reduces how much RAM it assigns as cache.

I havent run a pagefile since the day my Win98SE system got its second 1 GB stick, and I havent run out of RAM at any time since then.