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5 signs RAM could be slowing down your PC for gaming
Most people prioritize the CPU and GPU while building a gaming PC, as they're responsible for delivering the most performance, but overlooking other crucial components like the RAM can lead to PC bottlenecks. In fact, your PC's RAM is just as important as your CPU and GPU, especially in CPU-bound scenarios.
If you have weaker or slower RAM, your in-game frame rate will take a hit even if you have the fastest and most powerful CPU and GPU in your system. And if you don't have adequate RAM for the kind of games you play, you may even encounter crashes. So, here are some crucial signs you should look out for to determine whether your RAM is limiting your gaming PC's performance.
Stuttering
Games stutter even at high frame rates
Your games could run at over 100FPS with a fast CPU and powerful graphics card, but if your RAM isn't equally fast enough, you won't get a smooth gaming experience even when the frame rates are high. You'll likely encounter occasional frame drops, hitching, and micro-stuttering, which can get pretty annoying really fast.
It's worth noting that your RAM acts as a high-speed data buffer for your CPU. For instance, when a game needs to load assets like textures, environments, and character models, your CPU relies on the RAM to retrieve the data quickly. But if your RAM is too slow, you'll encounter intermittent freezes and stutters. It's possible that your RAM is fast enough, but it isn't running at its rated speeds. So, it's worth checking if you've enabled the XMP or EXPO profile in the BIOS.
High RAM usage
Concerning when you don't even have a game running
It's understandable if your PC uses a lot of RAM while playing demanding AAA games, but if your RAM usage is high (60-70%) before you even launch your favorite game, chances are that you don't have enough RAM to run the game properly.
You can use Task Manager's Performance tab to monitor your RAM usage during basic tasks like web browsing, video chatting, etc. For instance, if you have only 8GB of RAM and your PC utilizes around 4GB for background apps, you will inevitably encounter problems like stuttering, slow asset loading, and crashes while playing modern games.
Disk usage for virtual memory
Your PC relies on your storage drive to compensate
When your PC doesn't have enough RAM to handle all the tasks, it often uses the page file (virtual memory) on your SSD or HDD to store data. Although Windows does this to avoid crashes, your PC's performance will take a noticeable hit every time it uses virtual memory instead of physical RAM. That's because the RAM has much lower latency compared to even the fastest SSDs.
While gaming, you'll encounter freezes or stutters when your PC uses your storage drive's virtual memory, and the game's assets will take significantly longer to load. To check if this is the case, you can monitor your disk usage in Windows 11 using Task Manager; you'll find it in the Performance tab. Adding more RAM will significantly reduce your PC's reliance on virtual memory and improve gaming performance.
Poor 1% and 0.1% low FPS
Your average FPS doesn't tell the whole story
Most people have their eyes locked on the average FPS number while benchmarking games, but unfortunately, that doesn't tell the whole story. The 1% and 0.1% low FPS are equally important, as they indicate the lowest frame rates you experience 1% and 0.1% of the time during your gameplay. You may overlook a potential RAM or CPU bottleneck by neglecting the 1% and 0.1% lows.
As we discussed earlier, when your RAM isn't fast enough to keep up with the rest of the components, like your CPU and GPU, you'll encounter frame drops, which you'll see in the 1% and 0.1% lows if you monitor your hardware using MSI Afterburner. You can expect the same if you don't have adequate RAM and your PC starts using the page file on your storage drive. Either way, I highly recommend increasing the RAM capacity or upgrading to faster DDR5 memory to improve your 1% and 0.1% lows significantly.
Memory-related crashes
Your PC just doesn't have enough RAM to handle the game
This is self-explanatory, but you will encounter crashes if you don't have enough RAM to run the games you play. It's often a matter of time before you crash to the desktop with an error message that reads "out of memory." This is why I always suggest reviewing the minimum and recommended system requirements before purchasing PC games.
Most modern games require 16GB of RAM to run smoothly, and if you only have 8GB, expect to make some compromises. You can try closing the background apps that consume your RAM while gaming or allocate more virtual memory on Windows to help with the crashes to a certain extent.
Your RAM is just as important as your CPU and GPU
A high-end CPU and GPU don't matter much when your RAM is not on par. Whether your system doesn't have adequate RAM or it's just not fast enough for your CPU to retrieve data, you will encounter problems like stuttering, crashing, FPS drops, texture pop-ins, and so on.
For an ideal gaming experience, your gaming PC needs at least 16GB of RAM. I suggest pushing for 32GB of RAM so you don't have to deal with memory leak-related crashes. And if you're building a new PC in 2025, it'd be wise to spend your hard-earned money on DDR5 memory over DDR4 since it's significantly faster.