In this episode, Dawid learns always to do a DDU when switching between Nvidia and AMD

All of these "for science" videos you do are so awesome and Hilarious! Please keep them coming! 😂

I am genuinely surprised that these games ran just fine on only 8 GB of RAM... Maybe I should've never upgraded from my old Intel Core 2 Quad Q9550, 8 GB DDR2 800, GTX 560 SC gaming rig 🤣

With a modern SSD, chances are the game allocates more to RAM when it's available and otherwise just prioritizes what is on RAM by what is needed right now. Then it can swap data between SSD and RAM quickly when necessary behind the scenes, so it really doesn't affect framerate. Try this test with an HDD and I bet the differences would be more drastic.

Surprised 8GB is still holding up so well, albeit with dual channel configuration. I'm sure a big part of this is that you were using GPU's with 12GB of VRAM, so you were never VRAM limited. That's how these tests should be run so that system RAM is the only variable affecting results, but users attempting to get away with 8GB of system RAM will see a lot more performance issues if they don't have as much VRAM (on certain games and settings obviously).

Maybe turn of pagefiles. If your SSD is fast enough windows uses it as memory Edit: True. Windows can utilize HDD too, but they are much slower, thus you can see it. But nowadays SDDs are getting so fast you can't even notice when pagefiles are in use

Something I noticed when I finally upgraded from 8GB of RAM was that my FPS didn't change, my load times improved dramatically. I was having like full two-minute load times on Deus Ex: Mankind Divided (loading from an HDD) before the upgrade, afterwards it was only thirty-second load times, even though once I was in a level the performance was identical. Something you might consider testing.

Perfect video to show to my friends that constantly try to argue that you need 32G of RAM for gaming.

I don't know why it is so entertaining to what Dawid being perplexed by failing to fail but it is. We need more accidental debunk videos!

Dawid is in the very small circle where I have to watch ALL videos.. such an original personality

Actually pretty impressive video ngl. I've been telling people you don't need 32gb of ram to play games, 16gb is just enough, and apparently to my surprise, 8gb is still enough lol. I wonder if vram availability has anything to do with it since he is using a 13700k and 4090 gpu.

A good example of why DDU is one of the first few troubleshooting methods before going to graphics card changes

I watch Dawid Does Tech Stuff for the comedy, but this time I was completely blown away by the science. Can we give a moment of appreciation for Dawid? Not even LTT and other channels in the millions of users have found out what Dawid discovered in this video, at least to my knowledge. Possibly even the professionally done Marques Brownlee channel with phones. Amazing work by Dawid. I'm speculating that game developers deliberately tweak their programs so they run nearly as well on weak hardware systems as they do on strong hardware systems. Or as another viewer wrote, maybe the VRAM compensates. Weird. I hope LTT does something to explain this after a hat tip to Dawid for discovering the phenomena.

8GB of RAM used to be enough not that long ago. Also like others already pointed out, Windows creates about the same amount of virtual RAM on the System Drive, which these days is usually a fast nvme SSD.

SSD helps a lot. My friend has laptop with just 4GB of RAM and SSD but it felt incredibly snappy. Altough I also felt Windows chewing up that SSD with it's memory swapping operations

Happy I came across your channel 5 months ago, I've binged watched almost every episode, you got good humor thanks for the quality content 👍

You have to test it with Chrome running in the background. Honestly and considering how many games have multiple monitors, more tests should include some standard apps running in the background while gaming. Or running KZfaq while gaming, or even while streaming.

Another game that pretty regularly goes above 16 gigs of ram for me is hunt showdown, and when I had 16 gigs it was only using 10-12 iirc. Could be placebo, but in that case it did feel like it gave me more fps.

you know Dawid's hit the big time when he does component swaps before DDU'ing.

Co sidering I've binged almost your entire channel, nice to see a new video 😅

You didn't need to go DDR4 just to achieve 8GB. You can limit the amount of memory Windows can use through msconfig.

in certain games my monitor also flickers which I found was caused by having adaptive sync enabled, I even noticed the flickers on Starfield which was fixed by disabling freesync.

2:19 😂 I wasn’t ready for that 😂

Thank you for content! Whoot! I apprecaite every video you release!

You should have tested the amount of time it takes to lauch and relaunch a game as well as load and reload a map/level. Having less RAM means less of the file system is cached. I don't think it would make much of a difference with a nvme ssd, but I'd think that someone with only 8GB of RAM would be more likely to be running off a sata ssd or a mechanical drive.

I suspect having lower RAM won't affect *regular* performance that much, but it will increase the frequency of frame dips (reflected by the drastically lower 1% FPS). Ideally you'd want to either graph the FPS over time and compare how many dips there are among the different configurations, or get it numerically by... something like the second derivative of FPS/time?

Keep making these Videos Dawid they brighten up my week :)

Thanks for this Dawid. Good video. I had just put 32Gb in my basket for an upgrade from tight latency 16Gb. I needn't bother touching more ram at all. All the best to you!

Before watching this I'm sort of wondering if you haven't tested that like 20 times just this year? We already know the answer.

I’m glad you done this video, I’m just about to upgrade from 32GB DDR5 to 64GB for absolutely no reason😂😮‍💨

My favorite tech channel, great video.

Loved the Tarkov benchmarking thank you.

The games worked fine because of the swap file, if you disable it many games wont launch with 8gb, also if u put it in a slower drive (hdd or a sata ssd) it will probably reduce the performance

It seems the most important thing for gaming in terms of RAM is having dual channel for more bandwidth to the cpu and low latency rather than just more capacity. Which most of us already knew it's just some people like snobbing it up to justify their 64gb of ram. I've seen people unironically say 32gb is not enough for "future proofing" whatever that means

I was really looking Forward to this Video

This is a good benchmark, saving this one. Thanks.

I used to have a monitor that would only flicker when FreeSync was enabled. I know it happens to GSync monitors too. Pretty typical of VA panels.

Try to set your monitor's brightness to 100% with monitor's contrast to 50% and see if the flickering is still there. As for RAM, a bit surprised myself. I do tend to have at least 100s tabs open in Opera (up to a couple of thousand) which after a while it tends to eat up a bit of RAM, but since the rest of my machine is almost 9yo now, I tend to close it when gaming demanding games. Perhaps you could try with some video editing in the background, but I guess no one in their right mind would do that if they knew they had only 8GB of RAM and trying to play RAM hungry games.

Dawid growing out his mane for the winter 😂

Rebar was enabled in the latest Nvidia drivers for 30/40 series, nice 5-10% performance uplift!

Maybe 8GB kit works just as well as 16 thanks to fast ssd? not only it is fast enough to load stuff in time but also it is used as virtual ram (pagefile).

I'm guessing because your running the tests @ 1440p, it might not be stressing the CPU as much. Interested to see the same test @ 1080p and see what happens.

My mans really let the hairs grow and I love it

fun and informative, good work Dawid

I know 8gb of ram is fine for some modern games, while it'll have a hard time with other modern games

I wonder if the games are using your Hard drive as RAM storage when your only at 8GB of ram, so maybe see what happens if you use a mechanical drive instead of an SSD drive.

very interesting result for modern gaming era. thx for the effort

Most ram I’ve ever seen used on a game was the original WarZone and it used just over 24gb at 4K high settings. Madness.

been saying for a while that 32gb is necessary these days. MINIMUM 16 GIGS. But if you want a comfortable experience where you never gotta worry about it without being complete overkill, 32gb is the sweet spot

Claim your “here within an hour” ticket right here🏆

Todd Howard: upgrade your PC Dawid : hold my 8RAM stick

👍🏽🇬🇧 November 2023 What a fantastically-executed & really key experiment!!

Dang. That rug mouse pad is so rad

I was playing Starfield as I watched this, then I went and looked at the Dark Base Pro and coughed when I saw the price LOL. Great Video Dawid!

I have 32gb and I never max it out unless I’m doing some crazy virtualization. I have enough to run a game, a virtual machine, and browse the internet all at the same time if I wanted

Exactly the video i was looking for.

The rug mouse mat made it into another video! The Dude abides.

Amazing video, i would like to see new world in this tests cause i think it will show more differents than other game because of so many players in city's. And one think that i want to ask is: i changed mu gpu about 3 days ago (i had rx580 l, now i have rtx3070) and i expected that performance will be better in new world but nothing has changed in that game at all and im getting some real fps drops. I have two 8gb ram and i7 9700f cpu. I dont know what it the problem exactly although when im not doing anything with my pc, the ram usage is about 30% already and i dont know how to fix it

Totally unrelated thought, but after ages of watching your videos and wondering what the intro theme reminds me of, it finally clicked. Home Movies, it is clearly not the same, but in my head, it was painfully familiar.

Still rocking grandma's mousemat there. Top stuff.

Two are just fine.

You can dedicate RAM to your iGPU by using a custom BIOS which you can do by using rufos, a USB and some other stuff. There's KZfaq videos on how to do that and I recommend trying it out. I've done it for my Ryzen 7 5700u which has a Radeon RX Vega 8 iGPU.

Windows is really good at RAM allocation. The more you have the more stuff will be allocated to the physical RAM, when you game with just 8GBs then most of Windows stuff is thrown to the swap memory so all game assets can be loaded to the RAM memory

I'd be curious to see different ssd's tested, with different amounts of ram. Wondering whether the ssd's ability to quickly send files to ram has gotten to the point file shuffling can take the load off of lower ram configurations.

Yeah, it's def using swap (pagefile) with the lower memory configs (like others have said). I currently have a single 8GB stick of DDR4 and I'm using 83% of RAM and 86% of SWAP (two web browsers, Discord, Chatterino). I *almost* don't notice having a low amount of RAM even with a game open on top of everything else because of the pagefile running off of my NVMe drive. 16GB of RAM is def the minimum config I'd recommend these days for even a basic system imho (to prevent overuse of the system drive), with 32GB being a nice sweet spot cause RAM isn't all that expensive. Interesting video for sure!

Really interesting to see that dual channel is more important than the amount of RAM, as long as your graphics card have a docent amount of VRAM available. This makes half of world's prebuilds that much more cursed though....

Amazing discoveries, Dawid. This is actually very scientific.

Inconclusive tests are fun. Good job,.

Something that is vastly underrepresented in the testing space is city/factory builders. City skylines and Factorio both come to mind. Maybe not the most flashy of games, but both are massive databases the need the RAM equivalent of a 4090 to die slower. After all the factory will expand to fill the resources of the improving system. I know Factorio has a sizeable technical community that has some bench marking maps.

Very useful investigation.

I really enjoyed this, thank you.

I think this really suggests that Dual Channel but low capacity is a better short term investment for an upgrade to a very budget system than simply getting higher capacity single channel, but these results suggest I might not have seen any immediate increase if I had just gotten a single 16 planning to get a second 16 stick to run dual later like I had considered. Because I definitely noticed a significant performance increase switching from single 8g to 2x8g on a pre built AMD platform.

im glad you include Tarkov :D.

What a beautiful case. Glad i picked up the same one. Im still running 16gb of 3600 ram and haven't run into a single issue.

Love the videos quick question, this is to anyone, I have an alienware 15 r2 from 2015, can't afford an upgrade but is it worth buying or making a external GPU setup for it but my laptop screen only plays at 1080p what's the best setup

Awesomesauce, Dawid!! Maybe my system can play Starfield. 😅😢

was resizable bar enabled and if not it would be interesting to see the results of that

Brooooom a Dawid Does Tech Stuff is coming

I remember joking with coworkers about the 2gb ram requirement for vista it seemed like an insane amount at the time and here we are today

"like some kind of animal" best Dawid saying

I want to get one of those corsair build kits for my dad so he can play his bethesda games, but I am waiting to see if Corsair changes them to include the new meteor lake processors.

If you use more than one screen and have chrome discord etc open. Then you can see a benefit with more than 16GB. When I had 16 GB and used to have games up while doing something else on my second monitor, the system felt way more stuttery. And I think that has to do with how much windows can cache while prioritizing a game, and thus with more RAM it will feel smoother to transition.

i have had 32k ram as MINIMUM since 2014 or 2013? when did 4790k come? it still tugging along at 5ghz on my secondary comp, 8bm? is that not 2001 or something? windows xp black edition I think i had 8gb? or was it 12? it was when rampage extreme had TRI channel right? so 4x3?

Games nowadays benefit or even require an SSD. Even if it needs to go back and forth between volatile and non-volatile storage, at least it no longer has to wait for a slow mechanical hard drive to keep up. Try 8GB dual channel again but with the games on an HDD.

Excellent!!

I guess the amount you need doesn't matter as much as speed and timing above 8GB, and it mostly depends on the storage you have and what is running in the background. I'm struggling in some games with 8GB DDR3-1600, sometimes crashing with a SATA SSD. I guess you should rerun these tests with worse storage, slower sticks and older systems to see how it scales.

So I am also wondering if you are using ssd's in all your examples? Consider maybe swapping to hdd and see what happens? Im wondering if the page swaps have become very good on ssds that it becomes unnoticed, whereas if you use classic hdd, you'll see a difference. Something to test and do a part 2?

My guess is that while some may RECOMMEND 16GB of more, they may all mostly play with 8GB and if there is extra RAM needed, perhaps it re-adjusts the graphics load to allow the video card to perhaps handle a bit more processing that the RAM otherwise would perhaps. So for example, texture data or player movement, although maybe the video card does handle all of this. But my guess is that 16GB or higher probably assumes you have other stuff running in the background, and that the OS will consume 4GB just by itself.

When mounting AIO radiators vertically, the tubes need to be at the bottom, not the top. If the tubes are on the top, the small amount of air in the system will constantly recirculate in the pump, causing cavitation and damage over time. It'll also cause the pump to be noisy.

FYI never think about getting a single channel RAM build, I just upgraded my PC from 16 single channel to 32 dual channel (just to be clear I never had RAM size issues so the difference didn't affect performance). After the upgrade I literally went from 30 FPS that drops to 20 on Resident Evil 4 Remake to being a constant 60 on higher graphics settings for example. In emulation too, I went from running most Switch games at their native 30 FPS cap to being able to play at a modded 60 FPS (before, it used to be at 30-40 FPS at best).

5:04 OPERATOOORRRRRR

That video was facinating. i wonder how low you can go and still make it feel fine, does 2gb ram sticks still exist?... also a interesting test would be trying that with integrated graphics, i hears somewhere that having excess ram makes it more available for vram allocation on integrated units... a ryzen g should be a good test

I'm stuck with 16 single channel because laptop lmao, so happy to see that it doesn't upset games too much, expect beam, which is what I play the most 💀

When everyone is talking about a game you don't give a shit about but when a game you're excited for releases, silence

It really goes to show how good modern operating systems are at managing RAM. They compress and swap uncommonly used pages, saving tons of memory. Fast storage can help make swap so fast that its barely perceptible when data is swapped. Maybe if you tried 8GB of RAM on an HDD instead of an SSD it would make more of a difference. Now, I don't use MSI Afterburner so I might be wrong, but I'm pretty sure that the "RAM" number is not allocation, but actual "memory usage". There are a lot of terms and nuances here: - "Allocated memory", called "Committed" by Windows and "Virtual memory" by Linux: represents how much memory the program asked the OS, largely irrelevant number, some programs ask for hundreds of GB of memory and never use it (Chrome on Linux usually asks for upwards of 120GB of memory for example) - "Used memory", called "Used" by Windows and "Anonymous memory" by Linux: represents how much memory the program is physically using, usually only physically allocated when the program writes to it. The GPU "MEM" field of afterburner probably refers to memory allocated, while the CPU "MEM" field very probably refers to used memory.

Dawid is the only person that can obtain 0 unexpected results, but I will gladly watch and like the video

11:01 giggity

beamng with the multiplayer mods uses up to 20 gigs on my system sometimes

You should make a video about the prebuilt systems from pc garage

My gaming laptop only came with 8GB of RAM. Currently find it hard to run both discord and a game at once atm (mostly just play Overwatch and 7 days atm) So just bought a 16GB RAM stick! It's a i5 processor and 3050 GPU. So it's a decent laptop. Just lacking in RAM. The newest models of my laptop all have 16GB now 🙃 my gaming PC has 32GB and can run a lot of background stuff without it suffering. It's good to know that games can run decent offline with 8GB but as soon as you do online gaming and need another application in the background. It will not like it one bit.