How far ahead of the game is the i5 3570k?

[Dubnoman]

i still doubt youll see 8gb being used anytime soon in gaming. 8gb will be more then enough for a while. at least untill ddr4 comes out i bet.

 

Like I said, I will upgrade my RAM to 16 GB when I see devs start announcing that their AAA games will utilize 8 GB. Maybe that'll happen in 2014? I dunno, we'll see.

 

AT this stage, 3GB VRAM should be just fine, it's a lot more than the Consoles have, and console power dictates PC game system reqs. As for RAM, you'll need at minimum 8GB, preferably 10-12GB. A good cheap option would be a 16GB G-Skill RAM set and an extra 7950, because RAM is cheap and between those two upgrades, you should have absolutely no problems running anything at it's best for quite a few years; it's a LOT more power than the next gen consoles, so you'll have a very comfortable buffer for the next few years.

 

I have no need to upgrade for quite some time. I probably won't even need to upgrade when The Witcher 3 hits. My system is really good. But still, I'm eager to upgrade, haha. When cross-platform next gen games start hitting PC next year, I'm going to be eager to tweak my system so that it can run cross-platform next gen games like a champ. I might even put off upgrading for a bit. I will definitely play things by ear.

[Vindekarr]

Well, gen-eight is going to go on sale in September-ish 2013, so I'd guess an upgrade to coincide with this year's pre-christmas rush would be the best plan.

[JimboUK]

i still doubt youll see 8gb being used anytime soon in gaming. 8gb will be more then enough for a while. at least untill ddr4 comes out i bet.

 

Next gen consoles are a matter of months away, ports of games for those platforms will need significantly more RAM, the days of games using 2GB will be gone. 12GB will cover it and doesn't cost much.

[Vindekarr]

Aye, I'm running 32 GB, and I've payed more for a brake disk.

[Dubnoman]

I could just throw in a 4 GB stick and go up to 12 GB, but I think the better thing to do is bring the number up to 16 GB. Then again, maybe 12 GB would be all I'd need until I get a new motherboard that uses a new type of RAM. Hmm...

 

And I was thinking of getting an 8 GB RAM stick, but now that I think about it, I'll probably never need more than 16 GB of RAM until I end up with a new motherboard with a new RAM type. So, you guys think the smart thing to do is spend a good bit less and just get two 4 GB sticks of RAM? That sure seems like the thing to do.

 

Edit: I had thought that two 4 GB sticks sold together would be significantly cheaper than a single 8 GB stick, but they are actually almost the same price.

Edited July 30, 2013 by Dubnoman

[hoofhearted4]

 

i still doubt youll see 8gb being used anytime soon in gaming. 8gb will be more then enough for a while. at least untill ddr4 comes out i bet.

 

Next gen consoles are a matter of months away, ports of games for those platforms will need significantly more RAM, the days of games using 2GB will be gone. 12GB will cover it and doesn't cost much.

i still dont see consoles using all 8gb of RAM. first off, 1-2GB will be in use for the OS and whatnot, so that leaves only ~6GB max for games. like everything, only a handful of games will actually utilize the full amount of RAM. most games will still run on 2-4GB of RAM. i think 8gb will still be plenty. im not sure why everyone thinks these new consoles being released are going to make current PCs obsolete unless you upgrade them. yea if you have an old PC with 4gb RAM or something and some old GPU thats barely keeping up, then yea, an upgrade is in your future for sure, with or without new consoles. but any PC built in the last couple of years will be fine for some time to come. even if games regularly use those 6gb+ of RAM, it wont be right away. except for that one game Sony and Microsoft push out to show the power of their console, but then nothing comes out close to it for years (like Metal Gear Solid 4 for example)

[Aegrus]

Assuming I'm googling the right model, it's a quad-core at 3.4 ghz?

 

Yeah, it won't bottleneck anything. Most games will soon likely be optimized for quad cores, (I'm sure a few token titles will release with 6-core or oct-core optimization, but not many) and CPU's aren't going to be increasing nearly as much as GPU's through next-gen. You already blow away the CPU's of the next-gen consoles, so you should be good to go in that department.

[JimboUK]

 

 

i still doubt youll see 8gb being used anytime soon in gaming. 8gb will be more then enough for a while. at least untill ddr4 comes out i bet.

 

Next gen consoles are a matter of months away, ports of games for those platforms will need significantly more RAM, the days of games using 2GB will be gone. 12GB will cover it and doesn't cost much.

i still dont see consoles using all 8gb of RAM. first off, 1-2GB will be in use for the OS and whatnot, so that leaves only ~6GB max for games. like everything, only a handful of games will actually utilize the full amount of RAM. most games will still run on 2-4GB of RAM. i think 8gb will still be plenty. im not sure why everyone thinks these new consoles being released are going to make current PCs obsolete unless you upgrade them. yea if you have an old PC with 4gb RAM or something and some old GPU thats barely keeping up, then yea, an upgrade is in your future for sure, with or without new consoles. but any PC built in the last couple of years will be fine for some time to come. even if games regularly use those 6gb+ of RAM, it wont be right away. except for that one game Sony and Microsoft push out to show the power of their console, but then nothing comes out close to it for years (like Metal Gear Solid 4 for example)

 

 

PC gamers will also need RAM for the OS and whatnot, you don't want to end up with the paging out constantly. As for using this RAM, these consoles would have been designed with input from developers and they wouldn't have put all that RAM in there if the developers didn't want it or weren't going to use it. Higher resolution textures, a larger colour pallette, a greater variety of textures and storing assets in memory rather than reading from disk will push memory usage up significantly. Anyway RAM is cheap, I got 12GB of Kingston DDR3 for less than the price of a couple of PS3 titles, it would be silly to skimp on it.

[Rennn]

I agree with hoofhearted on this... Games are using such a ridiculously small amount of RAM now, I can't see it jumping past 8GB soon. 8GB will likely be the standard for a while.

 

Having said that, I'm going to add another 4GB stick once I have a motherboard that supports it, bring the total up to 12GB. I doubt it'll be needed for the next 4 years, but it's cheap so why not? I'll need 12GB before DDR3 is obsolete anyway.

Edited August 2, 2013 by Rennn

[JimboUK]

I doubt games will pass 8GB this generation but 8GB should still be treated as the minimum for any system you want to play games on, PS4 titles could end up using 6GB which doesn't leave a lot of wriggle room given the ridiculous amount Windows uses.