I remember reading an article not that long back in Custom PC about the worth of moving to 16GB and remember that there didn't seem any point at that time as games were not really using even 8GB. Have things changed in the meantime? (For gaming) Shall I scratch that itch and fill the four slots or spend it on cake instead?
Cake. I've got a PC running 4gb and it's never once had a problem. It also runs GTX 670 SLI, so I would soon know if there was a problem. The only issue I've ever had with 4gb was NFS : Shift. I put on 8xmsaa and it said I did not have enough physical memory. Odd ! but hey, certainly no reason to pay the inflated prices of late. 8gb is more than enough. Both of my other gaming rigs (4gb is my lovely lady's) run 8gb and one of them is a top end gaming rig and I've never had any issues.
RAM habits are changing - I've seen more new releases requiring 6GB - probably prompted by the new home consoles finally having more than 512MB. However, I think 8GB is going to remain the sweet spot for a good while. Sure, 16GB may be useful, but certainly not the ideal price/performance point.
Given the ridiculous price of RAM these days, there's absolutely no point, imo, having more than 8GB if you're gaming.
I use 16GB, but not for gaming; it's partly 'cos I sometimes run a virtual machine or two, and it's nice to have plenty of memory when you're doing that; and it's partly 'cos Linux is pretty great at making maximum use of my available memory. According to free -h right now, with no VMs loaded: Code: total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 15G 14G 521M 0B 482M 8.6G -/+ buffers/cache: 5.5G 9.6G Swap: 15G 1.5M 15G So, I'm using all but 521MB of my 16GB (which appears to the system as 15GB due to the usual rounding errors and what have you), of which 8.6GB is file cache - files that Linux has shoved in unused memory in case I want 'em again. Makes loading programs and what have you soopar-quick. But yeah, for gaming on Windows? 8GB's fine.
My personal take - when I had time to use my big rig I could happily leave one game running in the background if a friend came online and wanted to play something else. Extra RAM just gives you extra flexibility. 8gb is right now going to provide all the memory you need for most tasks. If you want to compute with very large datasets, render or leave Skyrim running while you play BF3 for half an hour, 16gb is better than 8gb. It's a marginal upfront cost for a mature tech that won't be out of date for years, with minimal operating costs. It has a few benefits, some of which are very important to a small set of users, but not for gaming.
I have 32GB, thought about going to 64. Decided against it. 32 does everything now, no need to add some just for e-penis.
Since OP asked specifically about gaming, the simple answer is no, 16GB is not necessary (nor even is 8GB).
I tend to agree with this 4Gb was the magic number a couple of years ago. I never noticed any difference going from 8 to 16.. Go buy some cake
It does. Currently sitting at 2.4 in use and 5.2 cached out of 8. An SSD is a much more cost effective cache though. The most I've ever got to is 5.5gb when I had at least 50 tabs open. Four's fine and its the easiest component in the world to upgrade if necessary.
I have 12 and it's sometimes not enough for certain tasks... however most games and day-to-day barely touch most of it...