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.
What are you guys doing with all this?
My two media servers are Orange Pi Zeros with 512 MB, and I could get away with 256 MB, I just bought what was available locally for cheap. My main 24/7 server is Raspberry Pi 2 with 1 GB of RAM. Same story here. I have some beefier machines (but not like that), I power on when I need them. My main desktop machine has 32 GB, but I use like less than 8, I see no difference after upgrading from 16. Did that simply to tick the task as done. I mean, the more the merrier, but 128 sounds insane, especially for a household use. All my ARR stack (before I removed it) was working on a Raspberry Pi. Simple serving machine (with no transcoding, but I’m still unsure why would people even use it in the first place), I tested with an IDE HDD (read: very slow reads and writes) and it was quite good for serving huge 4K Bluray Remuxes. I haven’t tested the system with a huge number of users, but if I were to help an extended family with their media needs, I think I’d go with building a set of underpowered servers for everyone. We have two cheap laptop disks, 500 and 750 GBs each, and that’s plenty to have various movies and series being there for us to watch. Even if I wanted to have it in terabytes, like a huge collection, do you really need so much ram to support this much storage? It’s a WORM scenario, isn’t it?
Apart from that, yeah, looks cool. It’s curious to learn what it is to work off a machine where you can serve everything from memory.