Gabriele Svelto (gabriele.svelto.delete@this.gmail.com) on January 27, 2020 3:33 pm wrote:
> Jukka Larja (roskakori2006.delete@this.gmail.com) on January 27, 2020 6:55 am wrote:
> > Games aren't all that memory intensive (typically. There are exceptions, just like me browser use
> > is exceptional). Assets are mostly held in GPU memory (and if GPU doesn't have (enough) memory,
> > then it typically doesn't have enough power to use full resolution textures anyway). Very few games
> > require more than 8 GBs or recommend more than 16. Those numbers typically have quite a bit of
> > air, as there's no way to know what people will have running in the background. There are actually
> > quite a large number of people who run games on systems below minimum requirements.
>
> This is something I've been wondering about for a while. Ignoring games that don't use large assets
> (and there's quite a few successful ones these days) won't most of the others need some form of streaming
> anyway? There's AAA games with assets that exceed the 100GB mark, you'll need some form of on-demand
> loading mechanism to cope with that. And once you have that mechanism then your memory requirements
> are more or less fixed around a certain amount irrespective of the size of the assets.

That's pretty much true. The steaming itself takes relatively large amount of memory (you'll want to decompress and load one asset while the next one is streaming in), but it scales with disk and CPU speeds, not asset amount, and not linearly. Of course, the game consoles have shared memory, so there isn't a separate limit on how much GPU memory to use.

> > As for "Usual usage patterns", maybe I should have emphasized more that I meant
> > anything below certain requirements. My usage patterns are crazy compared to most
> > people, yet I could still manage with 16 GB RAM and couple of GB page file.
>
> In my case the only workload that requires large amounts of memory is parallel
> compilation. Everything else I do would likely fit in less than 8GiB.

I wouldn't have much trouble with 8 GBs on my non-work, non-gaming laptop. Having 16 or 32 allows me to use browser tabs instead of todo lists or bookmarks. And do something unusual couple of times a year.

> > Sadly, people don't by SSDs by GB. I have 66 GBs free and if I want to have more, I need to buy 1 TB model
> > and go through considerable trouble to transfer the Windows installation from old disk to new one (I can do
> > that. Most people don't know how).
>
> Yeah, there's an entire market of commercial tools to do that for those who don't know.

The hard part is getting the laptop open without breaking anything (probably not a problem for mine, but I couldn't open my sister's Vaio few years ago) and finding something to attach two M.2 disks at once. Luckily there are some USB adapters available, although they do seem to be pretty expensive (cheapest one I could quickly find was 48 €, while USB-SATA 2.5" can be had for 14 €).

Anyway, the trouble of physically replacing the disk is the biggest problem in my opinion. Otherwise I would probably have bought the same laptop with less RAM and smaller SSD and replaced them myself (that would have saved some money, but not enough).

-JLarja