HELP!! How much RAM do I actually need for Cyberpunk 2077?

I'm planning to play Cyberpunk 2077 and I'm a little confused about how much RAM I actually need.
I keep seeing people say 16GB is enough, but others recommend 32GB, especially if you're running other stuff in the background.
I'm currently looking at the Biwin Black Opal DW100 DDR5 RGB Memory and trying to decide which capacity to get.
For those of you who play Cyberpunk 2077, how much RAM are you using? Is 16GB still enough, or should I just go with 32GB?

Franco chen said:

Is 16GB still enough, or should I just go with 32GB?

Click to expand...

16gb will be fine for cp2077.

16gb should be fine. you can always open taskmanager and see how much its using while playing....

16gb is enough, wait til ram prices come down to add more.

8GB will be enough. If stuff is running in the background, either turn them off, or the OS will allocate priority to Cyberpunk2077 since it's what's active.

What all parts are you buying and what do you have now? Officially CP2077 requires 12GB (don't do that) and recommends 16. 32 is overkill for that game, but what you should do depends a lot on what you have, what you're changing, budget, and what else you're going to do with the rig.

I'd get the 32 gig kit just for dual-channel.

Axman said:

I'd get the 32 gig kit just for dual-channel.

Click to expand...

That'd be my general recommendation for a new full gaming build, but given current prices sometimes compromises are appropriate especially if an upgrade to an older rig is involved. So whatcha got and where are you going sort of questions.

Axman said:

I'd get the 32 gig kit just for dual-channel.

Click to expand...

As well as future proofing. Ram costs aren't coming down any time soon; they'll just continue going up, and 16gb is already getting smaller for games.

If you have to ask, you can't afford it!
/s

I always recommend purchasing 32GB for future proofing but if that isn't in your budget then 16GB will do just fine for CP2077.

I think you can get away with 8GB if you are good about turning background stuff off. 16GB is certainly enough for most.

32GB may provide a slight benefit by keeping more of the assets in drive cache, but by no means necessary to have a good experience.

At least that is my recollection, but I haven't run it in a while.

Zarathustra[H] said:

I think you can get away with 8GB if you are good about turning background stuff off. 16GB is certainly enough for most.

Click to expand...

8 is hard these days because so much stuff that runs uses so much. An example is Steam: You need it for a lot of games, so you often have to have it in the background. The basic service doesn't use much but it's "web helper" which is it's GUI (it just uses HTML like so much else these days) uses 700MB plus. So you can lose almost a gig just to Steam, which many games will require to be loaded for them to load. Shit like that, little here, little there, and it is easy to go from the 2ish GB that a bare Windows install will use up and up and it is easy to have 6GB or more taken up. Now it can, and will, page things out and compress memory to try and make it work, but ultimately you have a better experience with less memory pressure.

Along those lines: Slack, MS Teams, Outlook, and Discord are all "we use a whole-ass web browser to do our UI" programs and can use up a bunch of RAM running in the background. Even if you are on 16GB, I'd recommend not running any of those when gaming if possible. Keep RAM pressure as low as possible.

In the before times I'd simply recommend more RAM, 32GB minimum to avoid ever having RAM pressure, but I totally get why people want to keep it as low as possible these days.

Your recommend about less background shit is a good one, there's just often only so low you can go and some of that shit uses way more than you'd expect it would.

Sycraft said:

An example is Steam: You need it for a lot of games, so you often have to have it in the background. The basic service doesn't use much but it's "web helper" which is it's GUI (it just uses HTML like so much else these days) uses 700MB plus. So you can lose almost a gig just to Steam, which many games will require to be loaded for them to load.

Click to expand...

Yes, that POS also needs to run all the time when playing a game. At least with other launchers, you can close them as soon as game loads.

PS- I think frank is gone. One and done.

are closed said:

Yes, that POS also needs to run all the time when playing a game. At least with other launchers, you can close them as soon as game loads.

PS- I think frank is gone. One and done.

Click to expand...

Probably, but H comes up in Google often so it isn't worthless to have a good discussion if someone searches the thread.

I'd get 32gb if you can.