this post was submitted on 16 Jan 2026
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[–] Bimfred@lemmy.world 3 points 1 month ago (1 children)

The OS takes its chunk of RAM. And I'd imagine most people don't close all unnecessary background processes when launching a game. So they'll have Steam and Epic and Discord and the management software for their RGB (multiple, if the individual components are mismatched) and their browser with like 30 tabs open in the background. Under these circumstances, it's not outside the realm of possibility that 8GB of RAM is gone even before the game is launched.

[–] rumschlumpel@feddit.org 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

True, but for minimum requirements, I'd expect that they consider the case where most of the unnecessary processes are closed. Also, only 30 tabs? Rookie numbers!

[–] Bimfred@lemmy.world 5 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Fidelity creep is also a thing. Unless you're going for a deliberately retro or stylized look, you need high detail assets and lots of them on screen at once. Otherwise you'll never hear the end of "gaem bad cuz PS2 grafix lol."

Environment textures are huge. Main character textures are huge. And you're not loading just one file, you're loading multiple files per model. The diffuse map, the specular map, the reflection map, the normal map, the subsurface scattering map for any organic models. And gods help you if your character model has interchangeable parts, because you'll be loading the whole set of textures for every element of those as well. These things add up very quickly.

And you still need space in the RAM for your code and physics and worldsim calculations, animations, everything going on under the hood. So I dunno, 16 doesn't sound outlandish these days.