this post was submitted on 05 May 2026
360 points (94.3% liked)

Technology

84413 readers
4122 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related news or articles.
  3. Be excellent to each other!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
  10. Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.

Approved Bots


founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

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.

top 50 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] Regrettable_incident@lemmy.world 5 points 15 hours ago

Lol they got copilot to write it.

[–] arcine@jlai.lu 17 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I have 16 and I've never had any memory pressure issues 🤷🏻‍♀️ But I'm on Linux so maybe that's why.

[–] GreenKnight23@lemmy.world 2 points 17 hours ago

I have 96 on Linux and have never had a problem with my 300 containers and 8000 browser tabs.

[–] Comrade_Squid@lemmy.ml 13 points 1 day ago

Its great to shit on windows but, honestly I don't see an issue...

Linux user.

[–] Romkslrqusz@lemmy.zip 74 points 1 day ago (7 children)

Outrage?

I build PCs for a living, I’ve been pitching gamers the 16GB baseline / 32GB futureproofing ‘no worries’ for more than 5 years now.

[–] FauxLiving@lemmy.world 7 points 1 day ago (1 children)

It's social media, you can stir up outrage on any topic because social media conditions people to be outraged at everything.

[–] CanIFishHere@lemmy.ca 4 points 18 hours ago (1 children)

Being intelligent has been replaced by being outraged.

[–] FauxLiving@lemmy.world 1 points 21 minutes ago

People use social media to be entertained.

Confronting nuanced issues and learning about difficult topics simply can't compete with angry hot takes and highly refined memes.

[–] imetators@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 1 day ago

I remember getting 2nd 128mb DDR that allowed me to run Half Life 2 more smoother. Or additional 2GB of DDR2 to upgrade for 64bit Windows 7. Wild times.

[–] flubba86@lemmy.world 3 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

Exactly right. I would never build a gaming PC with less than 16GB these days. And for friends and family, I'd push them to try to go with 32GB if their budget extends to it.

The sweet spot is probably around 24GB, but then you're mixing module sizes.

[–] ozymandias117@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago

Just gotta go back to tri-channel

load more comments (4 replies)
[–] andros_rex@lemmy.world 16 points 1 day ago (4 children)

Ya know, I’d rather just have plain text website designed for 4 gb or less. I’ve never been in the financial position to have 16 gbs, and it’s far worse now. I just want to not be denied access to text because all websites want to secretly run so much JavaScript and all the other shit. Eventually I’ll give up on the web and just be happy on gopher and Gemini.

[–] T156@lemmy.world 2 points 18 hours ago

We had a rather nice thing going with pure HTML. Sure, it wasn't the prettiest thing, even with CSS, but almost every device could run and display it in its own way.

You didn't need a custom thing, or a bunch of extra code adjusting the webpage for each type of device that opened the web page, since that job was all done by the browser.

[–] CanIFishHere@lemmy.ca 2 points 18 hours ago

Win11 will go web surfing just fine on 4GB. Things will be a bit snappier if you have more.

[–] Diurnambule@jlai.lu 2 points 1 day ago

With the art in ascii <3

[–] leftzero@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 1 day ago (2 children)

4 gb or less

Back in my day 640KB were more than enough for everyone!¹

  1. No they weren't, but 4MB with expanded memory was luxury and could easily fit any program you threw at it, drivers and all.
[–] Regrettable_incident@lemmy.world 1 points 15 hours ago

My first computer was a thing called a ZX81 with an amazing 1k RAM. TBF I couldn't do a huge amount with it. When the BBC B came along with 32k it was an amazing advance. That was a nifty machine, could program in basic and assembly.

[–] Diurnambule@jlai.lu 1 points 1 day ago

In my time rocks were forbidden to do logic.

[–] TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world 58 points 1 day ago (8 children)

I mean. I agree. I can't imagine a modern system with less than 16gb and a competent system for any thing beyond a basic user needs 32, at a minimum. I'm on 128.

[–] Zagorath@quokk.au 8 points 1 day ago

I run 200+ tabs in Firefox and have no problem with gaming. Not super high end gaming, but I could play Baldur's Gate on reasonable settings, and regularly play the Age of Empires Definitive Editions/Age of Mythology Retold/Age of Empires 4. 16 GB RAM works mostly fine for me, though I do often feel a little constrained with aoe4 specifically.

32 would definitely be my recommended minimum for any power user like myself, but for the average user, 16 GB is enough even without getting into merely "basic user" levels.

I'm still on Windows 10 though, if that makes a difference. Microsoft has decided my processor is one generation too old to be allowed to "upgrade".

[–] ThePantser@sh.itjust.works 15 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (2 children)

128 here too, but my machine is for gaming and serving my family with arr content. 70TB of booty.

[–] TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world 18 points 1 day ago (2 children)

128 for a server seems crazy unless its like, an actual server. I'm homelabbing an old laptop with 32gb and thats overkill. And my NAS has 8gb I think?

[–] wltr@discuss.tchncs.de 6 points 1 day ago

What are you guys doing with all this?

My two media servers are Orange Pi Zeros with 512 MB, and I could get away with 256 MB, I just bought what was available locally for cheap. My main 24/7 server is Raspberry Pi 2 with 1 GB of RAM. Same story here. I have some beefier machines (but not like that), I power on when I need them. My main desktop machine has 32 GB, but I use like less than 8, I see no difference after upgrading from 16. Did that simply to tick the task as done. I mean, the more the merrier, but 128 sounds insane, especially for a household use. All my ARR stack (before I removed it) was working on a Raspberry Pi. Simple serving machine (with no transcoding, but I’m still unsure why would people even use it in the first place), I tested with an IDE HDD (read: very slow reads and writes) and it was quite good for serving huge 4K Bluray Remuxes. I haven’t tested the system with a huge number of users, but if I were to help an extended family with their media needs, I think I’d go with building a set of underpowered servers for everyone. We have two cheap laptop disks, 500 and 750 GBs each, and that’s plenty to have various movies and series being there for us to watch. Even if I wanted to have it in terabytes, like a huge collection, do you really need so much ram to support this much storage? It’s a WORM scenario, isn’t it?

Apart from that, yeah, looks cool. It’s curious to learn what it is to work off a machine where you can serve everything from memory.

[–] Fiery@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 1 day ago

If they're running a media stack with that much storage it qualifies as a server for sure. If they're running ZFS for storage, the recommended RAM for that is like 1GB/TB for caching so that'll eat a bunch of their RAM too.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] Professor_Piddles@sh.itjust.works 9 points 1 day 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.

load more comments (12 replies)
load more comments (5 replies)
[–] wuffah@lemmy.world 54 points 1 day ago (7 children)
[–] three@piefed.social 17 points 1 day ago

Body types are still relevant in this meme.

load more comments (5 replies)
[–] Arcane2077@sh.itjust.works 36 points 1 day ago (3 children)

I keep hearing about this “outrage” and not seeing it anywhere. This article doesn’t even bother to link to the singular tweet the author saw and wrote an article about

[–] three@piefed.social 18 points 1 day ago (2 children)

It's called click bait, sweaty.

load more comments (2 replies)
[–] bcgm3@lemmy.world 2 points 1 day ago

It's a disaster of biblical proportions. Old Testament. Real wrath of God type stuff. Fire and brimstone coming down from the skies! Rivers and seas boiling! Forty years of darkness! Earthquakes, volcanoes... The dead rising from the grave! Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together... MASS HYSTERIA!

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] IratePirate@feddit.org 12 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Roses are red
Fuck Microslop
My homies can't wait
For this bubble to pop

[–] Regrettable_incident@lemmy.world 2 points 15 hours ago

Roses are red
Violets are blue
Windows is dead
Fuck Microslop too

[–] Auth@lemmy.world 16 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (3 children)

Even on linux my non technical friend needed to go from 16 -> 32 because they were running out of mem playing monster hunter. So this just seems like good advice.

load more comments (3 replies)
[–] cenzorrll@piefed.ca 13 points 1 day ago (2 children)

What was the outrage? That windows 11 needs a fuck load of RAM? I would be outraged that they suggest 16 GB is enough for gaming on 11.

I have 16 GB on my work computer and is eating up 7 GB with outlook, teams, a single page word document, and a spreadsheet open

People not reading more than the title of bad headlines.

32gb was the “no worries” amount of ram for a gaming system. Specifically running games AND other programs.

People read it as you need 32 gigs to do anything then got mad.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] plz1@sh.itjust.works 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I built my original Windows 10 gaming PC in 2015, with 16GB RAM. I recently re-rolled it as a CachyOS gaming PC, and had the same RAM. All was fine. VRAM on the other hand, yeah, go big or don't bother. I thought I was getting a great deal on a RTX 5050 with 8GB VRAM. It is woefully inadequate for modern AAA games, for sure. Thank goodness for protondb.com though.

RTX 5090 is only $4000 right now... /s

YMMV depending on the types of games you play. GPU-bound ones (most, these days) will suffer without a good GPU. CPU-bound games (Civilization series comes to mind) are easier to build for.

I was hoping the RAM shortage and resulting VRAM price hikes would force the game development industry to renew a focus on performance and efficiency in resource utilization, but I think they are just trying to ride out this likely multi-year RAM price gouging we're currently in.

[–] Evotech@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Why nvidia though. I got rx9070xt for what. 800 bucks?

load more comments
view more: next ›