Is there really a need for 16gb RAM in a gaming system?

[PP Mguire]

When I make my new build I will have a minimum of 8, preferably 16 to 32.
The reason for this being is I "love" to host servers. Games like Minecraft that can have a maximum of 500 players on a server at once need a lot of ram to hold those amounts. I usually just play with 2 other's than myself. The maximum I've hosted Using 2G of Ram allocated to my server is 4 including myself. On Minecraft Classic I can host 8 people with 1G of ram but no less. I once called all my PC Gaming friends and we all played on my Classic Server. I then proceeded to give them all gun rights and we just kept shooting each other for a long time... Still no issues. Remember you will need a good processor for a server also. Ram isn't enough to run a fast server. And Only top end games require descent amounts of ram these days. BF3 recommends you have 4GB of Ram to run smoothly so if you wanted to run a public server on top of that with 16 players I would say you need 16GB Ram to run smoothly without any lag. Also Servers will need enough processing speed to be able to do process players actions without anymore than 10ms of lag from the time the context reaches the server to the time just before it leaves back to the client.

That's covers the basic stuff to do with RAM and Next Gen Gaming/Hosting.

Most of us here know that. Problem is, we are discussing RAM with simply gaming. Not game servers, as server themselves require large amounts of RAM.

 

[Oreo]

Well as the OP implied, we are talking gaming here. I just proved you don't need more than 8GB to game even with the pagefile off. Also why I said, the people who need more have too much crap running in the background which is why RAM requirements are going up in games. Not because they need more RAM themselves (the games).

Lol, they don't take that into account when testing game requirements. Anyway, Crytek have pretty much openly said they need 8GB for next gen consoles, developers will use whatever ram you give them. The sooner every PC and laptop is bundled with 8 and 16gigs of ram the better.

 

[PP Mguire]

Lol, they don't take that into account when testing game requirements. Anyway, Crytek have pretty much openly said they need 8GB for next gen consoles, developers will use whatever ram you give them. The sooner every PC and laptop is bundled with 8 and 16gigs of ram the better.

Actually, they do. Why do you think Vista and 7 requires more RAM than XP? Because the OS itself has a larger foot print.

 

[Oreo]

Actually, they do. Why do you think Vista and 7 requires more RAM than XP? Because the OS itself has a larger foot print.

Well yeah the OS of course. But they don't assume people have photoshop and 50 instances of firefox open. Because if they did, they would reccomend 6GB. As I always use 5-6GB in most big games. I only get about 3.5Gb of usage in games if I close everything.

 

[PP Mguire]

They can't simply assume everybody is like me and run absolutely nothing in the background with a minimal install. They have to assume people will have computers like Dells with lots of bloatware or people with at least multiple things running in the background. If they didn't assume this then Skyrim wouldn't have 4GB recommended as in it's vanilla state doesn't even take 1GB of RAM. It is essentially what we were talking about in the other thread, a true console port.