4GB RAM still sufficient for gaming

Hardware

August 20, 2015

Is 8GB of RAM really needed to run all of your favourite PC games?

Well, recent testing by TechSpot shows that dropping down to 4GB RAM has very little impact on gaming performance.

TechSpot ran tests using 4GB, 8GB and 16GB RAM to see which was the best investment. The rig used for testing purposes was made up of the following components:

Intel Core i7-6700K (4.0GHz – 4.2GHz)
Asrock Z170 Gaming K6+
Dual-Channel: 16GB DDR4-2666 RAM
Dual-Channel: 8GB DDR4-2666 RAM
Single-Channel: 4GB DDR4-2666 RAM
GeForce GTX 980
Crucial MX200 1TB
SilverStone Essential Gold 750w
Windows 10 Pro 64-bit

They tested out the effects of everyday desktop work and RAM usage for 4GB maxed out at 70%. TechSpot further said:

Once you have enough memory for all your applications to run, having more memory won’t increase performance any further.

So to make use of 4GB RAM, your computing habits must not exceed the above threshold or be exceedingly heavy duty for the testing to be applicable.

There are heavily demanding games out there which may require 8GB RAM and it will still remain the recommendation for building a game rig.

But the results from TechSpot’s testing reveal some interesting surprises when it came to gaming performance.

They tested out a bunch of games with 65 tabs open in Google Chrome and found that they used 9 to 10GB RAM out of 16GB RAM.

Very surprising results! Image courtesy of TechSpot.

Surprisingly, in Grand Theft Auto V, 16GB and 8GB RAM configurations ran at 56fps, whereas the 4GB RAM system ran slower at 55fps.

TechSpot conducted similar tests for Batman: Arkham Knight and F1 2015. You can see the results below where the differences between all the RAM configurations are again very surprising.

Shock me again! Image courtesy of TechSpot.

There seems to be a trend here. Image courtesy of TechSpot.

TechSpot did carry out some other tests that showed off increased speed with 8GB and 16GB of RAM, like compressing files with 7-Zip and various other tasks.

However, with gaming large amounts of RAM are not really needed it seems, as you can even get away with 4GB RAM in your rig.

The catch is that you can’t be running anything heavy duty in the background while playing a game. We’re still stunned that you can get such performance out a low amount of RAM and that’s impressive.