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.
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I mean, 32gb is the no worries upgrade. I would say 16gb is the minimum any gaming PC should have.
At this point, I’d assume 16GB to be the baseline just for the OS. I gave 8GB to my Windows 10 VM and it chugs.
To be fair, VMs chug no matter how much RAM you give them, because the GPU stuff almost always goes through software rendering instead of to an actual GPU. At least AFAWK.
You can get around that with passthrough but you’d need a dedicated GPU just for the VM.
– Topaz
16 is bare minimum. 32 is comfortable.
This might be true for microslop winblows which uses steamos as a performance benchmark they are hoping to meet.
Any gamer strapped for cash should just try their games on Linux.
switched my gaming desktop to Linux and my 32GB of RAM are basically useless unless I unnecessarily open a bunch of stuff for no reason and even then it doesn’t take as much as Windows did. Amazing how bloated Windows is.
Good news: That spare RAM will become disk buffer cache on Linux, so it’s not useless after all.
This is part of why modern games claiming to need an SSD will often run pretty well from a slow mechanical hard drive on Linux.
You can always start self-hosting services in the background to use up some ram. No need to spend money for things you can easily host yourself on hardware you already have powered on.
