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.
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.