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.
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.
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.
Roses are red
Fuck Microslop
My homies can’t wait
For this bubble to popdeleted by creator
Outrage?
I build PCs for a living, I’ve been pitching gamers the 16GB baseline / 32GB futureproofing ‘no worries’ for more than 5 years now.
I remember getting 2nd 128mb DDR that allowed me to run Half Life 2 more smoother. Or additional 2GB of DDR2 to upgrade for 64bit Windows 7. Wild times.
Exactly right. I would never build a gaming PC with less than 16GB these days. And for friends and family, I’d push them to try to go with 32GB if their budget extends to it.
The sweet spot is probably around 24GB, but then you’re missing module sizes.
It’s social media, you can stir up outrage on any topic because social media conditions people to be outraged at everything.
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.
Yours is the second comment I’ve seen in this thread where someone suggesting 16 wasn’t enough for gaming on Linux, despite multiple comments from Windows users with no issues on 16 or less.
I actually wonder if it could be that Linux ends up requiring more memory than Windows does. Not necessarily because of the OS itself, but that other applications being used are less optimised, plus maybe the Proton layer for gaming costs more than running the game on Windows.
its probably just the type of games. 16 is fine for most games. My friend plays 100s of different games but only MH required more than 16. So 16 is fine but 32 is really the no worries amount. For me it was modded cities skyline that pushed me to get 32gb.
When windows uses 6-8GB at idle, there’s a lot of room there for Linux to catch up with helper programs.
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.
I run 200+ tabs in Firefox and have no problem with gaming. Not super high end gaming, but I could play Baldur’s Gate on reasonable settings, and regularly play the Age of Empires Definitive Editions/Age of Mythology Retold/Age of Empires 4. 16 GB RAM works mostly fine for me, though I do often feel a little constrained with aoe4 specifically.
32 would definitely be my recommended minimum for any power user like myself, but for the average user, 16 GB is enough even without getting into merely “basic user” levels.
I’m still on Windows 10 though, if that makes a difference. Microsoft has decided my processor is one generation too old to be allowed to “upgrade”.
Yeah, we get it, you are rich. Go brag someplace else fat cat.
It wasn’t that expensive a couple years ago. Unmecessary to go to 128, but not that expensive.
Maybe he bought that RAM before the crisis. I got a 64GB netbook last year, shortly before it became unobtainium.
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.
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
What are you even running that used so much memories?
Just fire fox and open office at the moment… Just a few tabs…
Damn, pretty sure there’s something wrong with it. I’m on cachyos and have 16gb of ram, it used around 4gb when idling with Steam running in the background, while using waterfox with 3 youtube tab running video and 4 other tab(yt, ytmusic, protondb, steamdb), the usage goes up to 7gb but slowly go down.
Maybe docker are the one using the memory? Or maybe the idling baseline is always around 25%/30% of total ram available idk.
128 here too, but my machine is for gaming and serving my family with arr content. 70TB of booty.
Argggh! Sweet
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?
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.
If they’re running a media stack with that much storage it qualifies as a server for sure. If they’re running ZFS for storage, the recommended RAM for that is like 1GB/TB for caching so that’ll eat a bunch of their RAM too.
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 got 32 GB and Zram set up. Must be the equivalent of 128 GB on windows.
Body types are still relevant in this meme.
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 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 called click bait, sweaty.
You mean sweety?
Welcome to the internet! Abandon all hope ye who enter here.
This!
What was the outrage? That windows 11 needs a fuck load of RAM? I would be outraged that they suggest 16 GB is enough for gaming on 11.
I have 16 GB on my work computer and is eating up 7 GB with outlook, teams, a single page word document, and a spreadsheet open
I have 32gb on my work laptop but that shit still feels like molasses because of all the background garbage from both windows and admin and also the fact that lunar lake single core speed is slow as hell. I do definitely use most of that ram though and honestly I’m not sure that it should considering about 50% of my work is in the cloud. Then again vscode also sucks and I can’t use anything else because my company is ass backwards about approving software. End rant.
People not reading more than the title of bad headlines.
32gb was the “no worries” amount of ram for a gaming system. Specifically running games AND other programs.
People read it as you need 32 gigs to do anything then got mad.
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.
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.
Windows 11 has a minimum ram requirement of 4GB. 32-bit Win 10 required 1GB, 64-bit 2GB. You won’t be doing much of anything with that little RAM, but they will boot and “work”.
Imagine how fast our computers could perform if modern coders programmed like they did in the '90s and earlier.
And as someone that has spent countless hours shaving bytes and bits off microcontroller code to fit functionality to few KB of storage and optimizing routines to shave off a few cycles from loops, it’s kinda sad to think about it. Today you do the same things by running Python code often under a full blow Linux distro…