Predict Memory Requirements in 2025

[HutchinsonJC]

Some 80+ % of games now are fine with 8GBs of RAM with another small handful of percent of games maybe doing better with more than 8GBs primarily as a matter of background tasks/tabs, etc. Basically no games on the market require a full 16GBs, though there are a few games pushing into the 9GB+ of RAM usage, already.

As we move into the next year, games will most likely continue to push the boundary of 8GBs (high settings eating 9 or 10GBs and lower settings staying under 8GBs), and once a threshold is met in terms of what percentage of gamers have more than 16GBs of RAM (steam survey and similar), I suspect that the recommended hardware requirements of AAA games will suddenly explode (whithin a year or so) to 16GBs. It'll likely hover there for some years after that point.

By the time we're looking at 2025, we'll likely be at the cusp of moving to the next system RAM amount in terms of gaming, a cusp that'll likely be a couple years long. But I do not think 16GBs of RAM will be irrelevant for gaming by the time we're in the year 2025. It'll probably be like now in 2025 in that half the people will tell you 16GBs is fine and another half are saying move to 32 when in reality, most people will be fine with the 16GBs.

 

[IntelUser2000]

Another question, is what is going to happen with DIMM-sized PCM, Phase Change Memory, like Intel/Micron's 3DXpoint. Will that be cheaper per GB than RAM is, and therefore, most PCs in the future will have a hybrid memory storage arrangement, with two RAM DIMMs, and a bunch of PCM DIMMs as additional storage? Could happen.

Definitely. We may see 3D Xpoint DIMMs for the consumer as early as 2019, with Icelake on the mainstream and Cascade Lake-X for HEDT. If not, it'll be the following generation in a year or two. Not much application support in the beginning, except you'll likely get a true instant on mode that's a distant relative of S3 standby(StR). That'll be good enough to get application support in the following years.

6 years from that is 2025. General memory requirement may not increase much. But due to mass adoption of NV memories, it will probably increase quite drastically. Low end, you'll see storage and RAM combine into one tier. Mainstream systems will probably use varying combinations, but may be ok with NV memory only depending on the tier. DIY is higher end, so that and gaming systems will use a hybrid tier.

Because of that, I'll go for >128GB, since the poll is about gaming systems.