Does Skyrim SE really use 16+GB of RAM?

[Rayblue]

 

yes, 16gb is generally fine TODAY.  8 is too small.

 

 

 

Too small if it's mostly for gaming. For everything else such as plain browsing or office work 4gb is the minimum standard.

 

For some reason, some people are struggling to play this game with only 2gb of memory on a shitty laptop.

[CanadianBlueBeer]

 

 

yes, 16gb is generally fine TODAY.  8 is too small.

 

 

 

Too small if it's mostly for gaming. For everything else such as plain browsing or office work 4gb is the minimum standard.

 

For some reason, some people are struggling to play this game with only 2gb of memory on a shitty laptop.

 

 

8gb works for very basic tasks yes, 4 is painful. (been there, done that)

 

Anyone trying to do modern gaming on 2gb laptop gets ignored.  I remember the 90s all to well and memory amounts, and flat out won't put up with it.

 

quick mem price check (CDN prices)

 4gb x 1: $40

 8gb x 1: $55

16gb 2x8gb: $130

16gb x1: $145

32gb 2x16: $249

64gb 4x16: $549

 

that's DDR4  various speeds.    You can of course, take 2 8gb kits and do your own 16, or 2 16gb and get 32. (I did that with 2 sets of 32gb kits to make 64. They were on special)

 

btw, 128gb  8x16gb  @3000mhz C14 quad chan:  $1800    lol.

[peculiaris]

oh boy people calling 32gb normal... Kill me now I'm suffering.

[Rayblue]

Memory prices are fucking mad now, a long way from 2012 when they were then cheap; am told that gadgets are now taking much more of the demand for memory than PCs.

 

However, back in the mid 90s, having almost 128mb of memory for a server then cost a lot more, like almost US$10k, maybe even more. Honestly, we got a very long way when computers then were far more expensive.

 

http://www.relativelyinteresting.com/comparing-todays-computers-to-1995s/

 

Still, guess I'll have to save up for 16gb.

[khumak]

 

btw, 128gb  8x16gb  @3000mhz C14 quad chan:  $1800    lol.

 

 

That's more than I paid for my entire computer...

[Onionstarz]

I only played for 10 mins but at 1080P everything set to ultra It uses 2.2 to 3.5 system and just over 2.2 on my 1060

[CanadianBlueBeer]

around 2gb ram usage here. VRAM is all over the place tho.

 

Of course, no SKSE64 yet.  All bets are off at that point.

('cause we just don't know what will get used)

[Guest]

I remember my First pc with 768mb ram and 10gb harddrive.. it was fucking high end and ran warcraft3 on max settings

[khumak]

Not sure how much system ram I use with SE but I use a little over 3.9 GB of video memory and I have a 4GB card.  Still never crashes and frame rate never dips below 30 except when it auto saves.

[CanadianBlueBeer]

I remember my First pc with 768mb ram and 10gb harddrive.. it was fucking high end and ran warcraft3 on max settings

 

um,640k ram, dual floppies to start with.  Dropped in a 30 mb hd later. (that sucker was $800 at the time)

 

Old computers were NOT cheap.

 

Leisure Suit Larry was the first game I played on it.

[Guest]

 

I remember my First pc with 768mb ram and 10gb harddrive.. it was fucking high end and ran warcraft3 on max settings

 

um,640k ram, dual floppies to start with.  Dropped in a 30 mb hd later. (that sucker was $800 at the time)

 

Old computers were NOT cheap.

 

Leisure Suit Larry was the first game I played on it.

 

the father of a friend of mine bought back in the days 256mb ram for 2500 dmark, its about 1250 euros this days your 10 euros toaster got more of it... first game for me was commander keen on floppy

[Arhon]

Memory usage can be a very deceptive thing.. If you have 16GB of total RAM and run just Skyrim SE.. then the OS (Windows) will assign as much of it's free ram to Skyrim SE for use as it can. Whether it is used or not. If you have 8GB of RAM Skyrim SE will happily run inside that.

 

Yatol as usual has completely misunderstood how memory works. Wasted ram is ram not used by any process. The fact that his Skyrim uses 5GB.. is because that is the the limit of what a 32bit process can use (4GB available to Skyrim, and 1GB for Skyrim itself).

Just to correct something.

 

Skyrim(Oldrim) uses 32-bit executive.

 

Skyrim Special Edition uses 64-bit executive.

 

 

Anyway, for general gaming you only need 16GB RAM anything above it is a waste for general gaming.

 

Its a different story if you are using programs for video-editing,photo-editing and the like. Only then you will need more than 16GB RAM.

[strawb]

When i am playing I bring up windows task manager it shows on average Skyrim SE using 6 to 8gb of my 16gb ram. I have a 8gb video card, not sure how much of that gets used. But I reckon at times that it is nearly maxed. Would have to be running 4k texture for most every thing to worry 16gb of ram . Graphics is now the bottle neck, which is why I now have 8 gb. No point having 32 gb of ram and then only say a 4gb graphic card.

[Arhon]

When i am playing I bring up windows task manager it shows on average Skyrim SE using 6 to 8gb of my 16gb ram. I have a 8gb video card, not sure how much of that gets used. But I reckon at times that it is nearly maxed. Would have to be running 4k texture for most every thing to worry 16gb of ram . Graphics is now the bottle neck, which is why I now have 8 gb. No point having 32 gb of ram and then only say a 4gb graphic card.

 

GPU have VRAM not RAM.

Do you mean to say you have 8GB VRAM?

 

Textures are handled by your GPU VRAM.

 

I have a 4GB VRAM GPU(NVIDIA GTX 770) and i have no problems at all.

 

If you run alot of high resolution textures(2k-4k) then you should begin to see purple colors somewhere, that means that your VRAM is being used up and you do not have enough.

 

VRAM = Video Random Access Memory [Comes with your GPU]

RAM = Random Access Memory [Comes with the Memory Sticks(RAM) you add in motherboard]

[CanadianBlueBeer]

 

 

I remember my First pc with 768mb ram and 10gb harddrive.. it was fucking high end and ran warcraft3 on max settings

 

um,640k ram, dual floppies to start with.  Dropped in a 30 mb hd later. (that sucker was $800 at the time)

 

Old computers were NOT cheap.

 

Leisure Suit Larry was the first game I played on it.

 

the father of a friend of mine bought back in the days 256mb ram for 2500 dmark, its about 1250 euros this days your 10 euros toaster got more of it... first game for me was commander keen on floppy

 

 

I think I still have the floppies for keen around here.

 

[Bazinga]

I think I still have the floppies for keen around here.

Do they still work?

If not, just play them online. 

[peculiaris]

The program itself is 64 bit... so theoretically it could use up to

 

16.8 million terabytes

 

So get ready to buy some more ram.

 

[ChipyChops]

Games check for available memory before hand and use managers to allocate memory based on that information. If you're getting crashes because of memory starvation its because you're using apps / mods / etc after game launch that allocate memory and corrupt this information. 16 GB is fine, the game will take it into account.

[CanadianBlueBeer]

Get a mobo with 4 slots for memory and put 2 sticks in now (2x8).

16gb, but with room to grow IF NEEDED.

 

Problem solved.

 

 

 

(I keep looking for one with 8 slots, but they be hard to find, and expensive as all hell)

 

[cplirby]

On 4/24/2017 at 1:54 AM, Fixadent said:

According to this video, it shows that Skyrim special edition is using ~16GB of system memory, which I've never seen any game do before.

 

I'm in the process of building a new gaming PC, should I buy 32GB instead of 16GB?

 

 

What are you using to display your resource utilization in game?

[RickenMorty]

On 4/28/2017 at 8:08 AM, CanadianBlueBeer said:

4 is painful. (been there, done that)

My surface pro 4 just threw something at me for laughing at this as I read it out loud, poor chap (he's slow)

[Mertz]

SSE itself won't use the full 16GB (mine uses roughly 6GB regularly) but I've seen the SECK use 12-18GB of RAM before while porting and packing a huge mod.

If you're not building massive multi-gigabyte mods with tens of thousands of assets you should be fine with 16GB though.

 

[jimmywon34]

what about vram in SSE? I have 6gb, i'm already at 5.3 in the area I checked, could be higher in other areas idk. I haven't even installed any texture overhauls except for character/npc skin and meshes. I heard Bethesda cranked everything in the high resolution pack up to 4064 size and put it in SSE which could maybe be causing the high vram usage? haven't installed some of my other favorite mods yet either, wondering if I can even run this modded with a 980ti. anyone else heavily modded sse with a 980ti? I have 16gb ram and an i5 4690k playing on an ssd. I bring this up because about a few months ago I tried to give it a go, installed everything I wanted including a few texture pack overhauls and I would get hitching. where i'd run around in whiterun and the game would pause for a slight spit second each time it stuttered and then returned to normal. I didn't check back then how much vram I was using though but now that I reinstalled I checked and it's already pretty high despite only about 57 plugins installed so far and 69 mods. if I remember correctly vanilla sse no mods was already using 3.5 or so vram, which is crazy, the game doesn't look nearly as good as some of the other recent visually pleasing games that use that amount or less vram.

[nIn nIn nIn]

More VRam and more System Ram is always better in the modern 64 bit era. The more physical ram you have, the less your system needs to write and access the pagefile. HDD's are painfully slow (your game stutters when new graphics load in an area). More VRam and RAM equals fewer stutters in game.

 

Besides, system RAM is relatively cheap still. 32gb isn't necessarily double the price of 16gb. Video cards also tend to have a small premium for the large VRam version (budget cards).

 

These days, I would never buy a card with less than 6gb vram.

[jimmywon34]

what is optimal pagefile usage? msi afterburner tells me 10000mb when I just ran SSE. and around 5400 ram usage. seems like it should be the other way around. I have 16 gb ram.