Many people post screenshots of recent AAA games using up 10-20GB of RAM, before proudly saying that PC gamers need 64 GB of RAM for future proofing reasons. Is that really accurate though?

Well… no, it’s not. Because that’s not how RAM (memory) works. An operating system – and its applications like games and Chrome – will reserve as much RAM as it reasonably can.

So Hogwarts Legacy might use 15-16GB of memory when there’s 64GB available, but then it will happily run on just 1GB of RAM in a lower-memory system too – as I show off in this video.

I test out 8 different games at 5 different RAM levels to show off the effects of RAM deprivation on PC gaming.

The RAM specs are:

  • 64GB – 2x 32GB (Corsair Vengeance RGB PRO DDR4 3200MHz)
  • 32GB – 1x 32GB (Corsair Vengeance RGB PRO DDR4 3200MHz)
  • 16GB – 2x 8GB (Corsair Vengeance LPX DDR4 3200MHz)
  • 8GB – 1x 8GB (Corsair Vengeance LPX DDR4 3200MHz)
  • 4GB – 1x 4GB (XUM DDR4 2666MHz)

The games I played at each RAM level were:

  • Cyberpunk 2077
  • Guardians Of The Galaxy
  • Rocket League
  • Sniper Elite 5
  • Metro Exodus
  • Serious Sam: Siberian Mayhem
  • Hogwarts Legacy
  • Battlefield 2042

My workstation PC specs are:

  • CPU: Ryzen 5900X
  • Motherboard: Gigabyte B550 AORUS ELITE AX V2
  • GPU: Sapphire RX 6700XT 12GB VRAM

If you prefer text over video, please read on for the guide/transcript version of this video.

Video Transcript And Guide

Hey everyone! This computer has 64 gigs of RAM—or did before I yanked one of the 32-gig sticks. The reason I’ve done that is when you’re playing a game like Hogwarts Legacy, it’s easy to look at it using 16 gigs of RAM—which it does in some cases, by the way—and then say, “Ah, everyone needs 32 gigs of RAM or 64 gigs of RAM for future-proofing reasons.” But the problem is, memory does not work that way.

To prove that, I also went out and bought a 16-gig set of RAM, which has two 8-gig sticks. Basically, what I did is I went out and pulled RAM down to just 8 GB and played a bunch of games and actually saw at what point gaming became impossible. And because many games, including Hogwarts Legacy, actually still worked fairly well on just 8 gigs of RAM, I also bought a 4-gig stick of RAM just for fun. So, let’s dive into the results and see what happens when you start deleting RAM.

64GB Baseline

So, I’ll start off with the baseline test—two sticks of 32 gigs of RAM. I’ll put the details of exactly what hardware I have down in the description, along with the RAM sticks and everything else. With Cyberpunk running at 1440p, I was averaging around 47 FPS. The 1% lows were a little bit lower—37 FPS—but obviously, at this stage, with RAM not really being an issue, those 1% lows aren’t going to be as relevant as with, like, 8 gigs of RAM.

Then we come to Guardians of the Galaxy. This always runs fairly well, apart from the odd stutter here and there (I think due to driver issues or something). But basically, the benchmark results are 100 FPS average, with 1% lows of around 26 FPS. So, that is Guardians of the Galaxy.

Then I tried Rocket League, which obviously runs a lot better. At 1440p, my average FPS rates were over 400, with 1% lows around 200 as well, as expected.

Then we come to Sniper Elite 5, and at 4K, this was averaging around 61 FPS in general, with 1% lows fairly good at 50 FPS. And again, this is all with 64 gigs of RAM just to show off that baseline.

Then we come to Metro Exodus, and again, this runs really well at 1440p on my system, averaging 84 FPS—not really having any issues with stutters or anything else either.

Next, we come to Serious Sam, and the FPS rates are always really good here. Since this is an older game and engine, you’re looking at around 169 FPS average, and the FPS lows are around 100 FPS too, so no stutters or anything like that.

Then we come to Hogwarts Legacy, which is obviously a newer game, and people say it’s quite RAM intensive. I was getting an average FPS rate of 60, with 41 FPS 1% lows—so fairly good. When it came to the actual RAM usage, it was a massive 15 GB, which is quite a lot. But RAM usage actually decreases quite a lot when you have less RAM available.

Then we come to Battlefield. I couldn’t get my FPS tracker working, but I was averaging 60 FPS with no stutters or anything like that. So, these are the baseline tests.

32GB Gaming Tests

We can now look at the 32 GB test. I just removed one stick of RAM. At first, I thought I’d have to remove my CPU cooler, but luckily I was able to avoid that. You can see in Task Manager there, I’ve only got 32 gigs of RAM—which seems painful; I like my 64 gigs! But let’s look at the gaming results.

So, we come to Cyberpunk, and the performance here is good—no stutters or anything like that—but the average FPS rate of 44 was lower than with 64 gigs of RAM (47–48 averages). I’ll come back to that point in a minute because if we look at Guardians of the Galaxy, previously that had 100 FPS average. Now, this was down to just 79 FPS. I ran this multiple times, but obviously, it’s a lot lower. I think that’s due to having just one stick of RAM and not two.

Now, we come to Rocket League, and again, performance is always good with Rocket League. The average FPS rates were 431—so slightly lower than the 440 I saw with two sticks of RAM, but no real difference either. That’s not really a significant difference.

Sniper Elite 5 was exactly the same. I was having the 61 FPS averages before, with no real stutters—and this is what I had again with 32 gigs of RAM. So, 61 FPS average and good 1% lows as well, closer to 50, as we saw before.

Then we come to Metro, and no real stutters or anything. Quite good results overall, but the 78 FPS average here was slightly lower than the 84 I was seeing previously.

Then we come to Serious Sam, and no real difference here. The 1% lows were completely the same—or they were slightly better here, as they jump around quite a lot. The average FPS rates were fairly similar too.

Now we come to Hogwarts Legacy, the RAM hog. In this particular case, my average FPS rates were around 58 FPS. They were slightly lower than the 60 I was seeing previously. The 1% lows here were slightly lower, but I don’t think that was significant; I think that’s just natural variation. But if we look at the RAM usage now, it’s only 7.5 GB—not 15 GB, but 7.5 GB. I’ll come back to this point later, but effectively, I halved the amount of RAM in my system, and Hogwarts Legacy said, “Okay, I’ll use half.” Actually, it’s not using it; it’s reserving it. I’ll come back to that point later.

Finally, we had Battlefield. Again, I saw no real difference. My average FPS rates were 60, with no stutters or anything else. The game used around 1.5 GB of RAM, which it did with 64 gigs too.

So, Guardians of the Galaxy was noticeably lower there. I did restart my computer and run that benchmark multiple times, but I think it just doesn’t like running with just one stick of RAM. One or two other games did get slightly lower performance too, but most didn’t see any real performance drop-off—which is to be expected because, obviously, the RAM usage at 64 gig and also 32 gigs wasn’t really the bottleneck.

16GB Gaming Tests

But now we come to testing with 16 gigs of RAM, which, in this case, is dual-channel. It’s got two 8-gig sticks, so let’s see what happens. So, the first thing I did was, obviously, remove the remaining 32-gig stick of RAM. As you can see there, on the left you’ve got the other RAM, and I started putting it in. So that’s the first stick under the CPU cooler—which, thankfully, went in without me having to remove the CPU cooler. And that is the second button as well. Then you can see there, I’ve got a pitiful 16 gig. Well, it’s not really pitiful, because it does work on some games, actually.

So, we look at Cyberpunk. We’re back up to a 47 FPS average and no stutters. So, the same as we had with 64 gig, and better performance than with 32 gig—because now we’ve got those two RAM sticks. Cyberpunk was taking around 3.7 gigs of RAM here as well, which is quite a lot. But again, it’s going to take as much as is available. RAM isn’t the bottleneck here.

Then we come to Guardians of the Galaxy, and we are back to an FPS average of around 96 FPS—so slightly lower than the 100 we saw, but substantially more than with one RAM stick, which Guardians of the Galaxy really didn’t like. With Chrome open, we had the same sort of results, and Chrome took just over 2 gig. But Guardians of the Galaxy wanted 3 gigs of RAM, as you can see there.

When it comes to Rocket League, FPS rates were fine, whether we had Chrome open or not. We got around 440 FPS, with no real stutters either. So, there was no issue at all. Rocket League did want over 5 gigs of RAM, which is actually really high. But, as we see later, that’s not really required for getting 440 FPS—that’s just how much it reserved.

Then we look at Sniper Elite 5, and I was getting around 60 FPS average—so pretty much the same as before. Maybe one or two FPS lower, but in general, not really discernible, to be honest. It was pretty much the same. And Sniper Elite 5 was taking just under 3 gigs of RAM on average. With or without Chrome open, I was getting around 60 FPS, and this is how much RAM Sniper Elite 5 wanted.

Then we come to Metro. And again, I tried with and without Chrome open, and the FPS was lower here in both cases at around 76 FPS. So, it was lower than we’ve seen before. So maybe, finally, we’re starting to see some FPS drop-off now that we’ve lowered the RAM down to around 16 gig. It does seem to have had a little bit of an impact, but things are still perfectly playable, and RAM wasn’t the bottleneck here—it was still the GPU.

Then we come to Serious Sam. And FPS rates were around 162—so slightly lower than with 64 and 32 gigs of RAM, but not very significant either. And with or without Chrome open, we kept getting these FPS rates. Serious Sam always used less than 2 gigs of RAM—or I should say reserved it. It wasn’t actually actively using it, which again is a point I’m making throughout.

Hogwarts Legacy was using around 3 gigs of RAM here, and the FPS rates were unaffected. And we didn’t really have any stutters either. We had a good 1% low of 40 FPS.

Then we come to Battlefield. And again, we had 60 FPS with no stutters—so pretty much the same performance as we had with the other RAM sticks too. Battlefield was using almost 6 gigs of RAM, and Chrome was using 2 gigs. So actually, a lot of RAM was in use on the system, but that didn’t affect performance. So, we actually saw an increase in performance when moving from 32 gigs down to just 16 gig. And of course, that’s not entirely unexpected because we weren’t really being RAM-limited at 32 gig. By moving back to two sticks of RAM at 16 gigs, that actually caused a performance boost in games like Guardians of the Galaxy and things like that. So, not entirely unexpected, but obviously, it does show that many games do run fine on 16 gigs.

8GB Gaming Tests

What happens if I yank one of these and run with just a single solitary 8 GB of RAM? So here we go with the 8-gig tests. Removing the one RAM stick was easy enough. I just got the one closest to me—you can see it there. And then, if we look at Task Manager, we’ve just got 8 gigs—and that’s it, which definitely doesn’t feel like enough.

I tried out Cyberpunk, and annoyingly—well, I say annoyingly—it was actually working absolutely fine. I was getting fairly good FPS rates. So what I did was I launched Chrome, because, after all, we will have other applications open when gaming. And this is when the problem started. Immediately, we got loads of stutters. You can see the frame graph there is just going nuts—it’s really not good. So, while my average FPS rates are saying they’re 40 or whatever—I actually had an average of 42—my 1% lows were a lot lower. And even that average FPS rate of 42 was lower than we saw with all the other levels of RAM. And Cyberpunk was using around 1.4 gig—so actually quite a lot on an 8-gig system. Really, it was just unwilling to use less than that. And then there’s this constant battle where my CPU is constantly having to work hard to garbage collect. And that’s why we’re getting those lower FPS rates.

Then we come to Guardians of the Galaxy, and I tried with and without Chrome open. It used between 900 MB with Chrome not open and just 500 MB when Chrome was open—so not much at all, well, less than a gigabyte. But either way, the average FPS rates were around 41 FPS, even without Chrome open, which is a lot less than we were having before. So before, we were seeing 100 or 96 when we had those two sticks of RAM, and then 80 with just the single stick of RAM. But here, Guardians of the Galaxy, with less RAM, meant that we were getting substantially lower FPS rates—nowhere near any of the other ones and nowhere near the 80 FPS we were seeing with our single RAM stick either. So, this really did suffer.

Then we come to Rocket League, and actually, without Chrome being open, I was getting fairly good results. You can see here, maybe slightly less FPS results, but not that much worse. I then tried opening Chrome as well because, obviously, we will have applications open, and the average FPS rate was lower—so below 400, whereas all the other results with the other RAM levels were above 400. Here, Rocket League was only using around 470 MB, so maybe it just wasn’t really requesting enough, so to speak. But either way, the results were worse. I was seeing more stutters, which is rare in Rocket League, and the average FPS rates were lower.

Sniper Elite 5 then—and, weirdly, this was actually quite an efficient game. I mean, I get different FPS rates depending on where I am, but in general, I was getting a 61 FPS average. My 1% lows were fine as well, so actually, no real change compared to the earlier RAM levels. And, actually, Sniper Elite 5 was running on just 200 to 300 MB of RAM a lot of the time, and it was absolutely fine. So, actually, a very good performance here. I think the game engine actually coped really well with just 8 gigs of RAM available—so credit to Sniper Elite 5.

Then we come to Metro Exodus, and this did struggle a lot more. While it doesn’t look too bad here, the average FPS rates were lower. I tried with and without Chrome, but I was getting around 66 FPS averages and was getting more stutters—so 26 FPS 1% lows. This was all less than with the other RAM levels. So, certainly with 8 gig of RAM, Metro Exodus was definitely struggling. And, actually, in general, it was using around 400 MB of RAM—slightly more with Chrome shut—but that didn’t affect the FPS rates. In general, Metro did genuinely start struggling. And, again, less performance and more stutters and stuff.

Then we come to Serious Sam, and actually, it was fairly good. This is an older game, so we were expecting that. But what I did notice, playing with and without Chrome open, is that the FPS rates of 158 FPS were slightly less than we were seeing with anything else. And, yes, it sounds like natural variation, but I think, in general, we were genuinely seeing the FPS rate start to struggle because of that less RAM—even though Serious Sam was only using, like, 300 or 400 MB of RAM. I think we were starting to see some performance hits by actually going down to 8 gig.

Then we come to Hogwarts Legacy, which, as we remember, used 15 GB of RAM on my system when I had 64 gigs. And, actually, here, it’s going to get less than that. But the average FPS rates weren’t too bad—I was seeing around 57 FPS average. But I was getting more stutters—so 19 FPS 1% lows—which is a lot lower than I’d seen at the other RAM levels. So, although the average FPS rates weren’t too bad, I was getting slightly more stutters. Hogwarts Legacy continued to need around 1 GB of RAM, and it was constantly trying to get more than that. Then the system was garbage collecting it, and that’s why the CPU usage was slightly higher than with some of the other levels. There was a constant battle between how much RAM the game wanted and how much RAM the actual operating system had.

Then we come to Battlefield, and it just genuinely struggled. Whether Chrome was open or not, it just really couldn’t cope with having 8 gigs of RAM available. You can see here, it’s just an absolute slideshow. It was very, very painful. And, yes, I couldn’t get my FPS monitor here, but clearly, the FPS lows were just absolutely terrible. I even drew a bad smiley face there. And then we had a 25 FPS average—which is terrible. Everything else was at 60 FPS at the higher RAM levels. Battlefield just kept trying to get RAM. It was using around 1.7 gigs of RAM, and then the system was garbage collecting it down. I think that’s why you’re having all these stutters, because Battlefield just couldn’t cope with this level of RAM.

So, as you can see, 8 gigs is where the problems really started. You had more stutters, more jumps, more FPS lows, and things like that. And, obviously, Windows would sort of knock its RAM usage down as part of garbage collection. Then Battlefield would be like, “No, I need at least 1.5 gig,” which, obviously, when you’ve got 8 gigs, that’s not very much. So, as a result, you start seeing some really bad performance on Battlefield.

4GB ‘Gaming’ (LOL)

But now, let’s look at what happens if I just put 4 gigs of RAM in my system. So, here we go—the 4-gig test. This ain’t going to be pretty.

So, I couldn’t get RAM from the usual sources because, you know, 4 gigs just isn’t enough. So, I bought this on eBay. It’s some RAM, and it runs at a slower frequency than the other RAM sticks I ordered, but this is all I could get. I installed it, and it was quite simple—especially since there’s no heatsink or anything on it. It was quite a small stick of RAM, and you can see it there. Unfortunately, the whole Windows system was just very laggy. I realized quite quickly, even though OBS was running in a very efficient mode—it’s not recording in 4K or anything—I simply couldn’t run it on the system. There’s not enough RAM available, so I knew I had to record the screen with my camera instead.

Okay, Cyberpunk with no RAM—so let’s see if it can start up. And, at first, it actually did load, so I was kind of quietly optimistic. But then—nope—it crashed. Yep, that happened. So, I decided to run it again, but without the FPS monitor, so nothing else was open. It was working with 600 MB of RAM. Oh, my computer’s not liking this. Stutters. It’s using 800 MB of RAM, and that’s pretty much it. Every other application is using barely anything, but my FPS rates are not too bad—they’re in the 40s. My fan’s running at 100%—something really doesn’t like this. Yep, stutter. Oh, so close. Look at that—it’s broken again.

Okay, so it sort of runs with some level of FPS before completely dying. So, next up, I tried Guardians of the Galaxy, and let’s see how that did. Look at that—using 800 MB of RAM, and then it’s got garbage collected down to 400. But this is Guardians of the Galaxy, which has at least loaded. So, that’s promising, right? Surely, it’s going to work. Okay, cool, let’s just do the benchmark. Let’s see what happens. Yep, you guessed it. That wouldn’t work. It crashed. I decided to try it out one more time. Okay, just boot it up, let’s try again with the benchmark, and let’s see if it can actually run it. Yep, you guessed it—it’s crashed. It tried running, and it didn’t run. Okay, that’s multiple attempts—it just won’t actually play the game when it comes to it.

Okay, so that’s Rocket League. I was actually able to get Rocket League running, and it had decent FPS rates. I’ve been playing for a little while now, so the average FPS rates have been creeping up to above what they were before. But I think that’s mainly because I’ve been playing this for quite some time, seeing if things would crash—and they actually haven’t been. So, yeah, my average FPS rates are probably similar because, yeah, they’re dipping down a little bit now. But, actually, the RAM isn’t the issue here. So, if we look at the RAM usage, it is at just 300 MB. So, yeah, Rocket League is running fine with just 300 MB. And, obviously, the CPU is having to work a bit harder because it’s constantly garbage collecting, but Rocket League is working.

So, after that triumph, I decided to try out Sniper Elite 5. Okay, that’s a good sign. Okay, a bit of lag there, but it is actually launching. Yes… no… no! I was so close. I was so close to playing it. I was getting excited. Then it… come on… yeah, it just wouldn’t work. I did try restarting the computer and trying again, but it didn’t work. So, I moved on to Serious Sam.

Okay, so this is quite good gameplay. There’s no stutters or anything like that. I’m just going to turn the volume down slightly. But actually, no stutters. My average FPS rates are pretty good as well, so that is quite promising. So, that’s Serious Sam, which is an older game, but it is actually running on 4 gigs. And, for what it’s worth as well, the RAM usage is 400 MB. So, that’s actually fairly decent as well. I’m dead, but, basically, that’s fairly decent as well. 400 MB is, yeah, quite respectable. It’s gone down now to 265, just because I’ve died, probably. But that is Serious Sam, which did work, and it had fairly good average FPS rates.

Next up, Hogwarts Legacy. There we are. So, Hogwarts is coming up with 250 MB on launch. So, it does actually launch, at least. It’s now using 500–600 MB, and then it’s being knocked back down to 300 MB. You know, it’s trying to use more RAM, and then it’s not being given it. Let’s try and load a game and actually see whether that works. What am I at now? 300 MB… 600 MB… 600 MB… 800 MB. And now it’s been knocked back down to 400. So, it’s constantly garbage collecting on Hogwarts Legacy. If we look there, you can see it’s constantly being garbage collected. But, obviously, if it runs, then great—that’s actually a really good thing.

Right now, it is working. So, a few stutters there… oh, there we are, some more stutters. I’m actually walking around now, but I am getting 60 FPS in Hogwarts. There we have it. So, 600 MB of RAM, and Hogwarts is actually running with minimal stutters at just 4 gigs of RAM on the system. And I think that’s because, again, the actual… let’s put that down a bit. I think that’s because, again, even though it will try and use 15 gigs if it’s available on 64 gigs, it will also run on just 600 MB as well. And that’s why you shouldn’t just look at how much RAM a game is actually using—or you think it’s using—at a particular point, because, actually, some games are optimized to use a lot less than that, as we’ve seen. So, this is actually playable. This is perfectly playable. So, 48 FPS… 60 FPS… yes, so I’m getting my 60 FPS average—actually, slightly more. There we are—stutters and jumps. Oh gosh, no. I just said it was playable, and now it’s… what’s it done? No! No! I was just saying it was going to be really playable. It was averaging 40 to 50 FPS in many cases, but it’s now locked up. What’s happened?

So, Hogwarts is still there. It’s still saying it’s using 500 MB, but I think it’s now dead. Yeah, there we are. So, that’s Hogwarts Legacy, which actually got further than quite a lot of games on 4 gigs. So, that is pretty impressive, actually. So, well done, Hogwarts! Now, I just need to try and get out of this game.

At this point, everything had locked up, and I just needed to restart the computer forcibly. I couldn’t do anything else.

Final Thoughts

Let’s actually see if Battlefield can get enough RAM to actually launch and allow me to play the game. I doubt it, because we’re now at 98% memory usage, but who knows? Maybe it’ll actually happen. Oh wow, okay, it is doing something. Battlefield is using 1.2 gigs of RAM as well—that’s absolutely crazy. That’s the most RAM that any of these games were using. It keeps getting garbage collected as well, so Battlefield keeps trying to be a bit of a RAM hog. And then Windows is, obviously, garbage collecting everything it can. This is a constant battle. Nope. There we are—it’s died. I was going to say, it’s just not enough RAM. There’s this constant battle between Battlefield trying to take as much RAM as it can, and it just died. And it took Steam out with it too. So, the EA launchers and all of that crap are still there, but, actually, yeah, Steam and Battlefield are gone. But, ironically, now—look at that—the RAM usage has gone down absolutely loads.

But that is Battlefield, and I didn’t think it was going to run. Because it always uses between 1 and 2 gigs of RAM, and I simply don’t have enough of that available on this system.

Finally, we’ve killed off gaming by going to just 4 gigs of RAM—which is entirely expected, because it’s 4 gigs of RAM. What was more unexpected, in my opinion, was that 8 gigs of RAM actually saw many games run as expected. And we also saw that weird thing where two sticks of 8 gigs of RAM actually ran better than one stick of 32 gigs of RAM—which is logical. But, actually, many people would say the amount of RAM you have is more important than the actual RAM speeds and RAM configuration. And that just really isn’t true. Two sticks of fairly fast 8-gig sticks of RAM will do better than one stick of 32 gigs of RAM.

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