If you are a gamer and have been paying attention to PC games system requirements over the past year, you certainly noticed most of the new games are asking for pretty high specs. You may believe that only a high-end new gaming PC can play all the AAA new games at 4K. However, some of these specs are overblown, so you don’t really need to follow them to the letter.
The RAM, or system memory, is the component that gets the most hype in these gaming system requirements. You may noticed that games such as Call of Duty: Modern Warfare and other new releases are asking for as much as 16 GB of RAM. But, do you really need as much RAM installed on your gaming PC?
According to the tests performed by TechRadar, you don’t yet need 16 GB of memory. On a gaming PC powered by a RTX 2080 Ti GPU and a AMD Ryzen 9 3900X CPU, the staff at TechRadar was running game benchmarks at 4K. The PC games selected for the tests were two of the most demanding right now, Middle Earth: Shadow of War and Metro Exodus.
The conclusion of the tests is that 16 GB can only slightly improve your frame rates. For instance, in Metro Exodus at 4K the system with 16 GB RAM got an average of 36 FPS (frames per second) comparing to 34 FPS on the system with 8 GB. In Middle Earth: Shadow of War the difference was even less: 75 FPS on the 16 GB PC comparing to 74 FPS on the 8 GB PC.
These benchmark results indicate that for right now, 8 GB of RAM should be just fine. However, this may soon change with the release of more resource hungry games.
Of course, if you want to play AAA games on maxed out settings at 120 FPS you’ll likely need 16 GB of RAM. Your RAM requirements depend a great measure on the games you play and your setting preferences. In case you want to upgrade to 16 GB of RAM, now is a good moment. The price of system memory is cheaper than it used to be.
