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I went from 8gb to 16 gb of RAM recently, only noticing a slight performance increase in a few games.

This is as off of any topic that I can think of.

What is your operating system?

The 32 Bit versions of Windows hard lock your RAM, often to absurdly low amounts (like Windows taking up half your RAM amounts).

RAM is also rarely the bottleneck when it comes to game performance. Unless you're running 3-4 games at once, moving up from 8 gb to 16gb isn't going to boost performance much. Some RAM does work faster than others, but that is unrelated to how much memory the cards have (and the performance boost is minimal).

RAM is always a good start to boosting performance but even a TB wont do much if your processor is not good enough or your internet speed is not high enough. Specs of your PC please?

Amount of RAM doesn't increase your performance if you didn't hit the limit previously.
I don't think you need any more than 8GB for any game today, 16GB is for running multiple programs simultanously like Photoshop+InDesign+Illustrator or programs that need a lot of RAM like video editing software during rendering or CAD programs.

Yeah, 16GB is really only needed if you're making gameplay videos and multi-tasking and such.
What would make a bigger difference is faster RAM.

Win 7 64bit pro, I custom built my system, the only other upgrade I would need would be a new video card.

AMD 8350
MSI 970A-G46 (3 months after i built it I found out its a not recommended board for my CPU
16 gb Ram 1600
PNY 650 1gb (for some reason the card was using my system ram as its vram)(I never had any issues with PNY)
120 GB SSD for OS
1 TB drive foe games
3 TB drive for more games and stuff

It's only BSD when firefox was running (3 times in since 2013)

EDIT: Nvm you totally said it and I just read over it lol

You do have fast speed RAM cards though. There are faster but anything faster than 1600 doesn't do much for performance and is mostly just bragging rights when measuring Epeens on tech boards.

 LordofHats wrote:
EDIT: Nvm you totally said it and I just read over it lol

You do have fast speed RAM cards though. There are faster but anything faster than 1600 doesn't do much for performance and is mostly just bragging rights when measuring Epeens on tech boards.

Derp fact: the RAM I have is 1866 but the new ones were 1600, I got the wrong ones from amazon, even after i down graded the speed to match the new ones I still saw a bit of improvement.

But is it tough?

Yeah. I think the issue is that your RAM just isn't going to change too much for your performance. I seems like changing your graphics card or motherboard (assuming it has a drivers issue) would be more likely to give a performance boost.

 Ahtman wrote:
But is it tough?

I see what you did there.

Congratulations on your new RAM!

Shame my netbook only has 1GB of RAM...

 KaptinBadrukk wrote:
netbook

Isn't that basically an iPad but without any apps?

 mondo80 wrote:
I went from 8gb to 16 gb of RAM recently, only noticing a slight performance increase in a few games.

This is as off of any topic that I can think of.

It's not common for RAM to be the bottleneck in gaming. If you are a typical user with Windows 7+, you will not see any real increase in performance above 8gb.

 Ahtman wrote:
But is it tough?

Oh, you.

 LordofHats wrote:
What is your operating system?

The 32 Bit versions of Windows hard lock your RAM, often to absurdly low amounts (like Windows taking up half your RAM amounts).

........ wut

Yeah doesn't make much sense does it? I've never understood it either. Most often it caps you at 4 GBs, which back in the dread days of Vista left you with less than 2 GBs after the OS was done hogging memory.

Even weirder, that limit is all RAM, not just RAM Cards. If you have a graphics card with 1 GB RAM, you might not even be able to use it! I assume there's some technical reason 32 bit systems are that way, but I don't know what it is. This is why I praise the 64 Bit overlords

It's not a Windows based problem.

It's a limitation, as you say, with any x86 based system that has in excess of about 3gb of addressable memory.

 Ouze wrote:
It's not a Windows based problem.

It's a limitation, as you say, with any x86 based system that has in excess of about 3gb of addressable memory.

Isn't Wdinows 64 bit still an x86 (I thought x86 was a hardware thing, not a software thing?)? The 64bit Windows 8 can use something like 200+ GB of RAM (not that I imagine anyone has that much).

x86 is just a synonym for 32 bit, and it's both hardware and a little software - an x86 application will run on an x64 system, which you doubtlessly know, but an x64 system will not be able to use x86 hardware drivers.

Okay that makes sense.

To circle back again,

 LordofHats wrote:
This is why I praise the 64 Bit overlords

is very accurate - there is no really good reason any consumer should be installing a 32 bit OS. All it does is limit your options, unless you have some piece of hardware you absolutely must have that only has 32 bit drivers (which is extremely rare in 2015).

 Ouze wrote:
It's not a Windows based problem.

It's a limitation, as you say, with any x86 based system that has in excess of about 3gb of addressable memory.

Yeah, this is correct. From what I remember, if you disable paging, you can access that fourth gig of RAM in 32 bit Windows.

Jargon available here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3_GB_barrier

To the OP's point: More RAM does not always make a significant difference. It might have made somewhat of a difference, but you likely just shifted the bottleneck. Look at your other components and where the biggest performance hits are. Maybe CPU, likely video card, maybe even hard drive, depending on if you're looking for faster framerates, loading times, or what have you.

Big video cards eat into the 32-bit 4GB limit, too.
Since 32-bits allow for 2^32, or ~4,000,000,000 bytes, or 4 GB. That is how high the memory list goes, so that's all you can use (until extended memory mapping gets involved).
In theory, 64-bits, or 2^64 is 16 EB. Even with Moore's law, that's some time yet.

Too much RAM just lets you disable the paging file, taking the hard drive out of that part of the speed equation.

Just thought I'd correct a few things I saw here.

x86 doesn't necessarily mean its limited to 32bit. x86 can run a 64bit instruction set. For instance the Xbox One and PS4 are using x86 architecture.

Windows 32bit isn't deliberately locked to 4gb of RAM its just how it works. Each bit of ram needs instruction of a 1 or 0 (binary) so 2 to the power of 32 = 4294967296. Which is the maximum 4GB we're talking about.

Most people have an x64 or x86-64 processor and so they are capable of instructing up to 2 to the power of 64 = 18446744073709551616 bits of RAM (nearly 17 million TB)

However most 32bit windows operating systems, even if the processor is capable, aren't able to take advantage of it. I think some windows 2003 server iterations were able to access it though.

You might be able to get 32bit windows 7 or newer versions to work with more RAM by running the following command with admin.

BCDEdit /set PAE ForceEnable

However its probably better to reformat with the 64 bit OS

IIRC, x86 is where they stopped referring directly to the processor family (386, 486, Pentium, etc).
And, Windows 10 now only comes as 64-bit, with no 32-bit option?

 Skinnereal wrote:
IIRC, x86 is where they stopped referring directly to the processor family (386, 486, Pentium, etc).
And, Windows 10 now only comes as 64-bit, with no 32-bit option?

I think you can get Windows 10 32bit as there appears to be a download iso available, not entirely sure why you'd want it.

I've seen Edge eat 4GB of RAM by itself.