In the video of the previous 3A masterpiece video memory occupancy, we roughly understand what the current 3A masterpiece requires for video memory, but I believe that in addition to video memory, more friends may be concerned about the memory occupation of the game, after all, the topic of whether to play games now on 16GB or 32GB memory has also been discussed a lot. Recently, there are many highly anticipated 3A masterpieces ready to be listed on the PC platform, such as "Resident Evil 4 Remake" and "The Last of Us Part 1", etc., so this time we have found several relatively well-known 3A masterpieces on the market to see how they occupy memory under several different resolutions and picture quality.
Mobile phone channel: Bilibili
Test the game
Since we want to look at the memory occupation of the 3A masterpiece, this time we selected 4 relatively targeted games to test, namely "Atomic Heart", "Hogwarts", "Children of the Forest" and "Microsoft Flight Simulator". That "Atomic Heart" belongs to the category of better optimization, "Hogwarts Relics" of course substitutes for the category of optimization that is not very good, "Children of the Forest" can be regarded as an online cooperative masterpiece that eats more hardware, and finally "Microsoft Flight Simulator" This big killer I believe that it does not need too much introduction, everyone understands.
Test bed
In terms of the hardware platform for testing, we chose Core i9-13900KS plus Z690 platform, and there are 2 sets of memory, which are 8GB*2 and 16GB*2 3200MHz DDR4 memory. In addition, because Windows' virtual memory is automatically reset by the system by default, we have tried to directly set the virtual memory to 0, but even the well-optimized "Atomic Heart" will not load, so in order to be able to highlight the difference more obviously, we manually set the virtual memory to 10GB.
In terms of graphics cards, because the size of the video memory will also have an impact on the memory occupation, we chose the RTX 3060 8GB and RTX 4070 Ti this time to see what the memory will react under the mainstream to mid-to-high-end memory capacity of 8GB and 12GB.
Test methodology
When actually testing the game, we will test with the very high, high and medium graphics in the game, and the resolutions are of course 1080P, 2K and 4K. There may be many friends who know that different scenes and play time will also occupy different memories, plus the test route is fixed, so the results of our tests and when you play normally, it may be slightly lower, just as a reference.
Test comparison
First, let's take a look at the memory footprint of Atomic Heart. Here you can see that the memory occupation difference of different picture quality under the same resolution is not very large, basically the gap between memory is hovering between 200 and 500 MB, and the memory occupied under 32GB memory is also higher than 16GB, but the memory occupied under the RTX 4070 Ti is more, and basically eats about 12GB to 13GB below 32GB, which is about 1GB more than 16GB.
The situation of "Children of the Forest" is similar, the memory occupied by different picture quality under the same resolution is also very close, and the memory occupation of 32GB system memory, no matter which resolution and picture quality is higher than 16GB, and the memory occupation is obviously much higher than the previous "Atomic Heart", such as RTX 3060 8GB under 1080P is already generally 13GB, and RTX 4070 Ti is even more to about 14GB.
As for that "Hogwarts Relics" is very interesting, under 10GB virtual memory, if it is 16GB system memory, then under 4K no matter what quality it is, it will directly report an error crash when loading the save, and under 32GB of system memory, this game is eating close to 21GB of memory, which is very terrifying. If you change to 2K or 1080P, the situation is slightly better, and you can still fight 16GB of system memory under medium image quality, but it doesn't take long to switch to higher image quality, and there will be an error mania that explodes the video memory. It seems that if you want to play this game, 32GB of memory is basically a necessity, although 16GB is not bursting memory, but under the medium image quality, the memory plus virtual memory is hovering on the edge of preparing to explode.
The situation in Microsoft Flight Simulator is a bit different, and it is clear here that the memory occupied by the RTX 3060 8GB is much higher than that of the RTX 4070 Ti, especially in the case of 32GB of RAM. The difference in memory usage between the two is about 3GB, so we also took a look at its video memory occupation, and found that the memory occupation of the RTX 4070 Ti is much higher than that of the RTX 3060 8GB, so it also shows that the game "Microsoft Flight Simulator" will occupy more memory to remedy it when the video memory is not enough.
After reading the above pictures, everyone should have a feeling that 16GB of memory does not seem to be enough, after all, "Hogwarts" is even below 1080P, if only 16GB of memory can not open high quality. But if you count virtual memory, then it seems to be enough. Because then we tried again and set the virtual memory to auto-tune, so after taking up 13GB of virtual memory, Hogwarts Relics can be opened under 2K and 4K.
But in fact, 13GB of virtual memory is also very excessive, because in fact, most players will not manually change the location of the virtual memory, and the default is to set up in the C drive, if everyone's C drive does not reserve enough capacity when installing the system, in case it is red, it will have to be a headache for a while.
summary
In fact, in most cases, 16GB of physical memory plus system-allocated virtual memory is enough in most game situations, but if you want to do it once and for all, changing a set of 32GB of memory will be a better way, after all, the mainstream 32GB DDR4 and DDR5 prices are in a more acceptable range, then I hope this video can help everyone, in the future game journey will not be affected by the explosion of memory , we'll see you in the next video.