Video Games Tutorials and News - How Much Ram Do You Actually Need For Gaming. 2022
Jack and Matt are here with the Toasty Rose, and today we're going to find out if RAM size really matters. And today's article is brought to you by karma. Karma is an app and a Chrome extension that ensures that you don't miss a price drop or coupon code when shopping online. And on a side note, we actually recently started using karma because we planned so many PC builds that we actually wanted to see how much money we could save on Best Buy, and we saved a lot.
So make sure when you go to use our affiliate links that you use karma as well to make sure you can find the best prices on RAM like this. Installing karma is very simple. All you have to do is download the Google Chrome extension from the Chrome app store and install it. Browse to your favorite supported website and click the karma button in the top right corner.
From here, you can start saving products to your personal wish list, which we actually have a list saved with PC parts that we want to use for future projects, and you will get notified via email or push notification. If that product has gone on sale, or if that product has a relevant coupon code, or even if it comes back in stock so if you're hunting for a gpu, you can get notified when it comes back in stock.
Karma also scans the web for coupon codes and applies them at checkout automatically, helping you save more money. The feature is limited to the Chrome extension, and last but certainly not least, you can earn karma cash back by purchasing from select retail partners, What's not to love about this free tool?
Let's get back into the article. So the RAM that we picked out you can get on Amazon all day no problem. This is Patriot Viper gaming ram, so in order here we have 32, 16 and 8 gigs. They're all in dual channel, so you can see that's what the two mean. Two by eight means two eight gig sticks; two by four, two four gig sticks; and then two by sixteen, two sixteen gig kits; they're all ddr4; they're all 3200 megahertz.
We have it going into a b460 motherboard, so we may not be able to utilize the full 3200 megahertz, but it doesn't change the test because it still means they're all going to run at the exact same speed, even if it's only like 29 or 33. That won't be a problem, but this is a pretty good looking Ram.
It has heat sinks on every single one, so we won't have any heat problems, and our build is good enough that there shouldn't be any bottlenecks with the actual parts when we're gaming. What we're going to be doing is testing the traditional, like esports titles, maybe a couple high-end games here and there, because a lot of people may argue high-end games are where you might want 32 gigs of RAM versus 16, or if eight gigs is even viable for those high-end games, so what we'll do is run through a test of maybe two or three games per capacity.
And then just see what kind of numbers we have, so let's just dive into some testing. All right guys, let's not waste any more time and dive into the test results. Now we decided to test each RAM configuration in a couple of titles, those being Fortnite Warzone, Shadow of the Tomb Raider, and Borderlands 3.
Now, one thing to get out of the way is that Fortnite and Warzone are games that have a lot of different variables. First up in Fortnite at 1080p on performance mode, we got 210 plus fps. Now the game does run pretty smoothly, but there are a few hitches here and there, and you'll see when we start testing Fortnite at 16 gigs that we start having an issue.
If you have only eight gigs of RAM, you're going to get similar high frame rates, but the average lows are much higher on 16 and 32 gigs of RAM, and as you see, we switch over to 16 gigs. For Fortnite, the frame rate is pretty much the same but we're not dipping as far down as we were with a gig, so if you want a more constant smooth gaming experience on Fortnite, upgrading from 8 gigs to 16 gigs on your budget gaming PC would definitely be worth considering.
For Fortnite, 32 gigs was exactly the same as 16, unless you're doing any live streaming or multitasking in the background while you're playing Fortnite. It's really not worth upgrading your budget PC with 32 gigs of RAM, and as you see throughout the rest of the test, upgrading your budget rig to 32 gigs in general just doesn't make a whole lot of sense unless you're doing a lot more than just gaming on it.
Next up in Warzone, using the training mode, as I mentioned, we averaged about 100 fps using eight gigs of RAM. We really did start to notice an increase when we jumped to 16 gigs of RAM, getting over 120 fps. For the most part, as you can see, we didn't really get specific numbers while diving into training mode.
The reason we did this testing was that we really thought 16 gigs of RAM would be a massive difference in budget PCs, but for the most part, in the games we did test, eight gigs was still adequate. There are some situations where if you have stuff in the background. I can see 16gb being better, but if you're someone who just has a single monitor just gaming, nothing else in the background, fresh install, which I'll be totally honest with you, not many people out there actually do that.
A lot of you have stuff in the background. You know, eight gigs is fine, but when you add any sort of multitasking in there, 16 gigs is the standard you want to go for, and then when we look into 32 gigs of ram, we only got 120 fps in the war zone again, so it's basically the same as 16 gigs, no major difference there, and we were being capped a little bit by the budget system.
Now we could test this theory with, like, a super high-end PC where the GPU is not going to be maxed out and then we could make the RAM the main variable, but we wanted to test this in budget PCs because, given the market right now, let's say you have a mid-range PC but want to get more performance, you may consider upgrading your RAM.
Now let's go ahead and run through the next benchmarks. These are the built-in benchmark games. Shadow of the Tomb Raider and Borderlands 3, so we actually had some numbers to go off of, and really it was kind of weird. Shout out to your meter with eight gigs of RAM averaged 111 fps, but with 16 it averaged 107, and with 32 it went back up to 111.
So I really don't know what to take from these numbers. I'm thinking the system is just very bottlenecked by the GPU or CPU where any sort of RAM increase isn't going to help you that much, but this is another test just to give you some other numbers to consider. Very weird the same thing with Borderlands 3.
For eight gigabytes of RAM, we got a 110 fps average. With 16 gigs of RAM, we got 102. I ran that test multiple times and it was going between 102 and 106, so the fun of multiple runs was about 102. So, it was still less than eight gigabytes, which is very weird. I'll talk more about that later.
