If you’re someone who likes to play the latest games, you may need to upgrade your PC soon – and that’s even if you thought your rig already had everything you needed. Why is that? Due to rapidly increasing RAM requirements.
While most of us are used to seeing high-end GPUs and CPUs in various system requirements lists, we are now seeing an alarming trend when it comes to memory size. Is 32GB of RAM really going to be the new norm, and do we want it to be?
Another new game needs more RAM
However, another game has just joined the list of titles that feature 32 GB as system requirements: Speak. This long-awaited Square Enix title is coming exclusively to PlayStation 5 and PC, and that alone should tell us something – it’s a beefy AAA title, and your PC will need to keep up.
Speak has three different levels of system requirements: minimum, recommended, and everything to run the game at ultra settings in 4K. Going with the bare minimum equates to at least a 6GB Nvidia GTX 1060 or an 8GB AMD Radeon RX 5500 XT, plus the (rather old) Intel Core i7-3770.
These components continue to be popular even now; Nvidia’s GTX 1060 was only dethroned the most used GPU on Steam a short time ago. However, many gamers running these types of builds may not have 16GB of RAM.
The amount of RAM increases as we move to “recommended” specs. This includes an RTX 3070 or an AMD RX 6700 XT, an Intel Core i7-8700K or an AMD Ryzen 5 3600, and finally, 24 GB of RAM. However, if you want to play the game the way it was meant to be played – that is, near maximum settings – you’ll need one of the best gaming desktops of this generation.
The ideal system configuration for Speak include at least an AMD Ryzen 7 5800X or an Intel Core i7-12700. These two processors are still among the most powerful processors on the market. There’s a surprise in the graphics card department — Speak the developers recommend either an AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT or an Nvidia RTX 4080. This is an interesting gap, as the last-gen RX 6800 XT can’t hope to keep up with the RTX 4080 in 4K gaming scenarios.
In our tests, the RTX 4080 maintained 78.1 frames per second (fps) at 4K on average, while the RX 6800 XT was a distant second at just 49.1 fps. Speak is supposed to be optimized for AMD cards, maybe that’s why.
Finally, we have the monstrous 32GB RAM requirement. In a PC with an RTX 4080 and an Alder Lake CPU, that might not seem like much, but compared to the competition, it’s certainly a lot.
When “excess” becomes a requirement
Building a new gaming PC usually means focusing on two big components: the processor and the graphics card. Unfortunately for some, many other hardware components become a bit of an afterthought. Hey, I get it – they’re just not as exciting as CPU and GPU. Most manufacturers know that RAM is something you need, but likewise there comes a time when piling on even more of it becomes largely redundant.
For years, 16GB marked the sweet spot for gaming. Less than that and you might struggle, especially if you tend to be multitasking, like playing with Twitch in the background. Having even more RAM was nice, but mostly for productivity reasons and not so much for the game itself. It didn’t hurt, but it wasn’t necessary. Until this year.
Speak is the third title to come out with such a RAM requirement. This new trend was started by the PC port of Return then followed by Hogwarts Legacy. No surprise there. All three of these titles are AAA games through and through, and we’ve long expected them to be heavy on the requirements. However, it’s unclear how much the extra RAM will make or break a game’s performance.
Even then, it’s strange to see something that was previously considered overkill suddenly overwhelm us and become a requirement. It feels like it’s only a matter of time before 64GB of RAM becomes standard in high-end versions. And then, it won’t be long before more and more games are claiming 32 GB instead of the minimum 16 GB.
A possible explanation for the higher RAM requirements is the demand for memory in modern games. Large open worlds that involve a lot of player choice usually require a lot of data to be quickly loaded into memory before being dumped, which is why we saw higher performance with processors like AMD’s Ryzen 7 5800X3D .
Nothing stops the evolution of PC gaming, and even if it were possible, who would want to? Whether we like it or not, having 32GB of RAM may soon become more of a “you really should” sort of thing as opposed to “save your money, it’s not worth it”. In the case of DDR5 RAM, this means an outlay of approximately .
Considering high-end GPUs cost over $1,000 (hello, RTX 4090), that’s not too bad. But it all adds up, and part of me can’t help but miss being able to build a solid PC for the price of one of today’s GPUs.
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