Microsoft has quietly retracted its own documentation that suggested 32GB RAM is the “no worries” upgrade for gaming, and 16GB RAM is the baseline. This support document was likely written using a large language model, and Windows Latest first spotted it before it was taken down. Microsoft also nuked a document that recommended Copilot+ PCs for gaming.
Microsoft has a “Learning Center” where it publishes guides and marketing articles to promote various Windows features, and these rank well in search results. It’s mostly used by Microsoft to push a narrative and also make it easier for users to make a choice when they search the web.
In the first week of April, Microsoft quietly published a support document titled “Gaming features: What the best Windows PC gaming systems have in common.”
At first, the document might appear to be about Windows 11’s gaming features, but it goes a step further and builds a narrative around the memory requirement.
In the support document, Microsoft clearly notes that:
“For most players, 16GB RAM is a practical starting point. Moving to 32GB RAM helps if you run Discord, browsers, or streaming tools alongside your games. That extra memory also gives newer titles more breathing room as memory demands continue to rise.” – Microsoft.
“16GB RAM is the baseline; 32GB is the ‘no worries’ upgrade,” the company concluded in the support document, which was first spotted by Windows Latest.
This was later picked up by other outlets and the gaming community, and it didn’t go well with gamers.
Lol they got copilot to write it.
I just got a whole Mac with 16GB for $600 so I dunno what you’re talking about here.
I completely made it up for the purposes of this silly meme.
I mean, yeah. The memory schedulers handle their jobs completely differently between the two. MacOS and Linux are reasonably similar, but the latter does the best job of all three; Windows is just particularly terrible at it.
I mean. I agree. I can’t imagine a modern system with less than 16gb and a competent system for any thing beyond a basic user needs 32, at a minimum. I’m on 128.
128 here too, but my machine is for gaming and serving my family with arr content. 70TB of booty.
128 for a server seems crazy unless its like, an actual server. I’m homelabbing an old laptop with 32gb and thats overkill. And my NAS has 8gb I think?
My laptop is for super basic needs (i.e. not modern gaming), and I struggle to find ways to run out of its 8GB of RAM without outright fabricating the conditions to make it happen. Even when I play something like Surroundead, I’m short on graphical horsepower and still have RAM to spare.
One major detail is that I’m not using Windows.
My work machine, however, is on Win11 and only has 16 GB. And unless I turn off OneDrive, Teams and Outlook from autostarting, it will use nearly 12 GB to sit idle. It’s pretty useless.
I mean I’m on ubuntu with my current machine, not running anything particularly demanding and using 37 gb of ram.
Just saying, ymmv.
I’m on Kubuntu 24.04 and with 2 FF browsers(1 with 4 tabs the other with ~12), steam, haruna, and discord, I use about 8GB. 10 with OBS and SteamVR. I did go a little overkill with 64GB ram
Used used, or just used? File caches and memory-mapped files are technically “used” but are basically free since they can be evicted if that memory is needed elsewhere.
🐖
Wow
I keep hearing about this “outrage” and not seeing it anywhere. This article doesn’t even bother to link to the singular tweet the author saw and wrote an article about
It’s a disaster of biblical proportions. Old Testament. Real wrath of God type stuff. Fire and brimstone coming down from the skies! Rivers and seas boiling! Forty years of darkness! Earthquakes, volcanoes… The dead rising from the grave! Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together… MASS HYSTERIA!
This!
Ya know, I’d rather just have plain text website designed for 4 gb or less. I’ve never been in the financial position to have 16 gbs, and it’s far worse now. I just want to not be denied access to text because all websites want to secretly run so much JavaScript and all the other shit. Eventually I’ll give up on the web and just be happy on gopher and Gemini.
We had a rather nice thing going with pure HTML. Sure, it wasn’t the prettiest thing, even with CSS, but almost every device could run and display it in its own way.
You didn’t need a custom thing, or a bunch of extra code adjusting the webpage for each type of device that opened the web page, since that job was all done by the browser.
Win11 will go web surfing just fine on 4GB. Things will be a bit snappier if you have more.
Even on linux my non technical friend needed to go from 16 -> 32 because they were running out of mem playing monster hunter. So this just seems like good advice.
I always build my computers with a minimum of 64 GB RAM, so at first I didn’t see what the fuss was all about. But the article claims the Windows OS technically only needs 4 GB?!
And I see the push for more RAM is most likely to accommodate AI/Copilot, which needs a lot of resources to function. “Gaming” is just the excuse Microsoft is using to get people to upgrade.
This reminds me of a video I saw recently about how old computers didn’t have the space to waste code, so every line of code was micromanaged to perfection. But today’s computers have so much room on their hard drives, programmers don’t care how efficient the code is, as long as it runs. Which leads to your computer seemingly performing as slow (or slower!) than computers used to back at the turn of the century.
Our computers are more powerful than ever, multitudes more than the beginning of the Internet Age. And yet, we have so much wasted code because we have room for it, so our modern computers crawl. Imagine how fast our computers could perform if modern coders programmed like they did in the '90s and earlier.
Then we would still have the feature set and security and adaptability and price of that old tech.
I built my original Windows 10 gaming PC in 2015, with 16GB RAM. I recently re-rolled it as a CachyOS gaming PC, and had the same RAM. All was fine. VRAM on the other hand, yeah, go big or don’t bother. I thought I was getting a great deal on a RTX 5050 with 8GB VRAM. It is woefully inadequate for modern AAA games, for sure. Thank goodness for protondb.com though.
RTX 5090 is only $4000 right now… /s
YMMV depending on the types of games you play. GPU-bound ones (most, these days) will suffer without a good GPU. CPU-bound games (Civilization series comes to mind) are easier to build for.
I was hoping the RAM shortage and resulting VRAM price hikes would force the game development industry to renew a focus on performance and efficiency in resource utilization, but I think they are just trying to ride out this likely multi-year RAM price gouging we’re currently in.
Why nvidia though. I got rx9070xt for what. 800 bucks?
It is the minimum for gaming? 12gb you could be happy with maybe but that is not standard. 8gb is too little with browsers taking up like 4gb and you want to be able to play youtube videos while you play games it would be below minimum if you could not multitask reasonably.
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