Do I need more RAM for gaming? :: Hardware and Operating Systems

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muckymucks 29 Aug @ 10:56pm

Do I need more RAM for gaming?

I played Marvel's Spider-Man 2 and maxed out all settings including ray tracing. The game runs fine but after some cutscenes the game crashes right as it switches to gameplay. I checked task manager and it shows my RAM completely used up but I don't know if that's accurate. My specs:

i7-13700k
32GB DDR5 6,000Mhz
RTX 5090

I lowered the ray tracing settings from Ultimate to Very High and that seems to have stabilized it; but obviously I'd rather play at the highest settings. Is all I need is more RAM? Do I really need 64GB of RAM if I want max out games from now on?

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Showing 1-4 of 4 comments

Tiberius 29 Aug @ 11:01pm

Spiderman2 doesnt use that much memory. Something else is using your memory

MBK 29 Aug @ 11:01pm

No, 32gb is more than enough

Illusion of Progress 29 Aug @ 11:20pm

What gaming in a broad sense "needs" is a loaded question. What YOUR workload uses is the relevant thing to you. Meaning if you're using nearly all of your RAM, then yes, you will benefit from more.

However, since gaming in general typically doesn't need over 32 GB RAM, then unless you're able to account for what may be using that much RAM (a lot of people underestimate everything else they do), then you need to be cautious about buying more. For example, if you're using that much because of a memory leak, then adding more RAM isn't the real solution and is just wasting money.

The odd part is that even if you were using a majority of your memory, it's unlikely that you would crash as soon as you reached capacity (unless you disabled or changed the page file...). I don't know if lowering ray tracing settings will lessen the memory needs, but it will lessen both the GPU and CPU demand.

How long have you had that PC? And has the BIOS ever been updated?

That CPU is susceptible to two major issues; one is oxidation (a portion of 13th generation CPUs) and the other is degradation (all 65W+ Raptor Lake CPUs that were ever run on BIOS before the issues were addressed). The graphics card is also worth considering due to the power connector issues.