Microsoft has quietly retracted its own documentation that suggested 32GB RAM is the “no worries” upgrade for gaming, and 16GB RAM is the baseline. This support document was likely written using a large language model, and Windows Latest first spotted it before it was taken down. Microsoft also nuked a document that recommended Copilot+ PCs for gaming.

Microsoft has a “Learning Center” where it publishes guides and marketing articles to promote various Windows features, and these rank well in search results. It’s mostly used by Microsoft to push a narrative and also make it easier for users to make a choice when they search the web.

In the first week of April, Microsoft quietly published a support document titled “Gaming features: What the best Windows PC gaming systems have in common.”

At first, the document might appear to be about Windows 11’s gaming features, but it goes a step further and builds a narrative around the memory requirement.

In the support document, Microsoft clearly notes that:

“For most players, 16GB RAM is a practical starting point. Moving to 32GB RAM helps if you run Discord, browsers, or streaming tools alongside your games. That extra memory also gives newer titles more breathing room as memory demands continue to rise.” – Microsoft.

“16GB RAM is the baseline; 32GB is the ‘no worries’ upgrade,” the company concluded in the support document, which was first spotted by Windows Latest.

This was later picked up by other outlets and the gaming community, and it didn’t go well with gamers.

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[–] 10 points 6 months ago (12 children)

My laptop is for super basic needs (i.e. not modern gaming), and I struggle to find ways to run out of its 8GB of RAM without outright fabricating the conditions to make it happen. Even when I play something like Surroundead, I'm short on graphical horsepower and still have RAM to spare.

One major detail is that I'm not using Windows.

My work machine, however, is on Win11 and only has 16 GB. And unless I turn off OneDrive, Teams and Outlook from autostarting, it will use nearly 12 GB to sit idle. It's pretty useless.

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  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago (11 children)

    I mean I'm on ubuntu with my current machine, not running anything particularly demanding and using 37 gb of ram.

    Just saying, ymmv.

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  • [–] 5 points 6 months ago (9 children)

    Used used, or just used? File caches and memory-mapped files are technically "used" but are basically free since they can be evicted if that memory is needed elsewhere.

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  • [–] 4 points 6 months ago (8 children)
  • [–] 2 points 6 months ago (6 children)

    What are you even running that used so much memories?

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  • [–] 0 points 6 months ago (5 children)

    Just fire fox and open office at the moment.. Just a few tabs...

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  • [–] 6 points 6 months ago (3 children)

    Damn, pretty sure there's something wrong with it. I'm on cachyos and have 16gb of ram, it used around 4gb when idling with Steam running in the background, while using waterfox with 3 youtube tab running video and 4 other tab(yt, ytmusic, protondb, steamdb), the usage goes up to 7gb but slowly go down.

    Maybe docker are the one using the memory? Or maybe the idling baseline is always around 25%/30% of total ram available idk.

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  • [–] 2 points 6 months ago

    I'm on Kubuntu 24.04 and with 2 FF browsers(1 with 4 tabs the other with ~12), steam, haruna, and discord, I use about 8GB. 10 with OBS and SteamVR. I did go a little overkill with 64GB ram

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