Worth upgrading?

[Eric Graham]

Right now I am sitting at 8 GB of ram and I have the money to go to 16 but is it worth spending the money on from a gaming perspective? Will I really see that much of a difference? Right now all the games I'm throwing at my PC handle it with ease but I do see some lag from time to time but usually only in online play in GTA V specifically but I'm wondering if thats a server issue on their part or perhaps a bandwidth online issue?

Thoughts?

 

[FFK]

In my opinion i would update it to 16 because i have sone it and it helped me improve my gaming features since I have more space now

 

[Demon_Skeith]

Depends how much the RAM is, I thought about upgrading my old RAM but decided to save the money for a newer PC instead.

 

[Josh]

Sounds like it may be a RAM problem. Wouldn't hurt to upgrade to 16GB, will definitely need it in the next few years anyways.

 

[BatmanNight]

I think it will be necesary in the upcoming years,but for now I feel like it is not a must have.I would recommend maybe getting a better procesor or graphics card.The boost ai got from getting a gtx 980 was insane

 

[froggyboy604]

Upgrading your video card to a faster video card may help with video slow down problems on your PC when playing GTA V.

 

[YaBoyJoey]

GTA V isn't optimized for PC, so that'll lead to a good number of issues from the start. Extra RAM never hurts, and if you have decent internet, you could even use it to run a server for yourself. I tend to use my 16 gigs for handling tons of Chrome tabs, but it's always nice to have a lot of overhead while playing games as well.

The best way to answer where your difficulties are coming from would be to try different online games and seeing what your performance is like. For GTA V if it performs well in single-player, then there's a pretty good chance it's your internet, and not you machine.

 

[Lienx]

In my experience, just because the PC can 'handle' it doesn't mean it should. I've made my older rigs suffer pretty bad because of me wanting to save a few bucks and it just ruined the PC faster. By forcing it to do things at a lower spec just because it functions, will in the end just wear the rig down faster. I was doing a lot of editing etc with a smaller PSU and low amount of RAM for quite a while and it ended up frying a hard drive and my PSU because the Memory couldn't keep up with what I was doing and constantly shut down/over heat, etc. There were other little issues as well but when it all came down to it, it was because I was just 'settling' with the specs I had. I knew all good and well it was a bad idea but eh.

 

[EleGiggle]

I don't think that it would be necessary. The longer you wait the cheaper these RAMs will probably become. In your case I'd only upgrade if I was doing something important while gaming so it wouldn't hinder my gaming experience

 

[YaBoyJoey]

I don't think that it would be necessary. The longer you wait the cheaper these RAMs will probably become. In your case I'd only upgrade if I was doing something important while gaming so it wouldn't hinder my gaming experience

Oh man, this is definitely true. Totally forgot about DDR4. With DDR4 rolling out and lowering in price, DDR3 will definitely drop in price by a lot. Patience will really pay off here, and it'll end up being the same as solid state drives which were like $2-3 per gigabyte when they became readily available.

 

[eduguy]

I would say no. 8GB should be plenty still. While playing games like Battlefield, I only use about 4GB of my RAM. I'm pretty GTA 5 is not too RAM hungry, but you could use a monitoring program to check your RAM usage while playing.

 

[SirJoe]

The funny thing about computer components is that once they are launched they tend to be very expensive but gradually decrease in price until they hit a sweet spot and then they start increasing again. If you feel the Ram price has hit that sweet spot and you are thinking of keeping your computer for sometime I would upgrade. If you are thinking of buying another computer in the near future I wouldn't bother.

 

[froggyboy604]

Would upgrading to a SSD improve the performance of games?

I think very RAM intensive programs sometimes use a Virtual RAM file also called a SWAP/Page file on a drive, so your PC does not run out of RAM, and crash.