If you crave speed, you’re probably wondering how much Random Access Memory (RAM) your computer needs for gaming.
Many elements are taken into account, such as the games you play, basic technical specifications, and memory speeds.
No matter the speed of your storage disk, your access memory will store elements of your game in brief storage for convenient access.
The quick answer is that you need as much memory as allowed for complex, realistic games.
What Types of Games do you Play?
Like everything else, the answer to how memory benefits gaming depends on the type of computer gaming you undertake, the multitude of different games you play, and how intense they are.
Titles like Fortnite, League of Legends, and Counter-Strike: Global Offense may only demand 2GB or 4GB of memory, whereas games like PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds (PUBG), Rainbow Six Siege require at least 6GB or 8GB.
Rising above the baseline may be necessary to sustain greater frames per second speeds for better gameplay.
We all want a PC with the best gaming specs to improve our gaming performance.
How Valuable is RAM?
It is essential to the overall system and individual components, such as better graphics cards. But, in terms of games, how important are speed and capacity?
Firstly, if your system’s performance is hampered by slower hardware elsewhere, adding more and faster RAM will not help much.
The amount of RAM you have does not affect the speed of your processor or the transfer rate of your storage drives.
The second, slightly opposing point I’d want to make is an exception to this rule.
VRAM does a lot of the heavy work when producing graphics, so if you’re dealing with an older GPU with a small amount of VRAM, raising the number of RAM accessible to your system will likely result in much more substantial performance gains.
When an application can use it instead of virtual memory on a hard drive, performance improves, especially in frame consistency (switching between RAM and disk storage might lead to obvious microstuttering).
Bottom Line
Are speed and memory important for computer gaming? Yes, but only in a limited sense.
Capacity will only make a major difference if you upgrade from 8GB or less, and speed will give you a small boost in performance here and there, but nothing like the gains you’ll notice if you upgrade performance parts like the GPU or CPU.
When purchasing RAM, building a PC, or searching for prebuilt gaming PCs, the experts advise purchasing at least 16GB with room to increase and buying the quickest upgrade that works into your wallet without overspending on top speeds if the price difference is too large.
In general, they’re fleecing you if you spend over 20 or 30 dollars upgrading to another speed tier in a RAM bundle.