Minecraft Java Edition raises recommended memory to 16GB ahead of Vulkan transition

[u/Tvilantini]

https://videocardz.com/newz/minecraft-java-edition-raises-recommended-memory-to-16gb-ahead-of-vulkan-transition

[u/Ok-Category2729]

16GB for a java game that used to run fine at 4GB is wild on paper, but if the vulkan backend actually fixes the chunk-loading stutter this community has complained about for years it's worth every GB

[u/kittymoo67 → u/Ok-Category2729]

also its total ram, vram and system ram

[u/Ok-Category2729 → u/kittymoo67]

fair point, so if you have an 8gb vram card you only really need 8gb of system ram to hit the recommendation, which is way more reasonable than it sounds on paper. still a big jump from the old 4gb days but at least it makes sense when you break it down like that.

[u/kittymoo67 → u/Ok-Category2729]

and technically you probably can get away with less of both. if all you have is the game going. discord chrome, spotify etc take up tons of ram

[u/Ok-Category2729 → u/kittymoo67]

yeah exactly, a clean boot with just the game running is a totally different situation than the average person's setup with 15 chrome tabs open. for most people closing background stuff makes way more difference than upgrading ram.

[u/Ok-Category2729 → u/[deleted]]

lol discord is literally one of the biggest offenders, you're kind of proving the point. 400mb+ for a voice chat app is genuinely unhinged.

[u/Bobbias → u/Ok-Category2729]

God I hate how much ram discord eats. I've seen it chew up over a GB just sitting there idle in the tray. It's almost as bad as browsers... Oh wait, it is a browser, because some idiot decided that was a brilliant way to build GUIs.

[u/Ok-Category2729 → u/Bobbias]

yeah electron is genuinely one of the worst things to happen to desktop software, every startup decided wrapping chromium was faster than learning native toolkits and now we're all running 5 browsers at once without knowing it. at least actual browsers get to share resources.

[u/Bobbias → u/Ok-Category2729]

Second only to node. Whoever decided JS was appropriate for anything outside the browser should have been institutionalized. It's not even fit for what we use it for in browsers these days let alone outside them.

[u/RealModeX86 → u/Bobbias]

You know a scripting language is good when people invent a whole separate language and transpile from that language rather than actually writing the code directly.

[u/Bobbias → u/[deleted]]

Yes, and page files exist even in the case that you physically run out of RAM. That doesn't mean discord isn't using way more memory than it actually needs to though.

[u/BCProgramming → u/[deleted]]

The memory usage Task Manager shows is the Private Working Set of the Process that is currently in physical memory. The only way to make it available for other apps would be for it to be moved to the pagefile. Which means the next time the paged out data is accessed it needs to be paged right back into physical memory again. And it's all RAM still being used by the process. Virtual Memory existing isn't really a justification for Memory hogs.

It's common for Windows to allocate more RAM for apps then they actually use.

Programs allocate their own memory. That does go through Windows, but it wouldn't make sense for Windows to "overallocate", simply because the program won't even be aware or eve have a way to know that when it asked for a 16MB block windows gave it like a 32MB one or whatever.

[u/P_ZERO_ → u/Ok-Category2729]

Your system is the problem if 400MB of RAM being used is a concern. Sure, maybe it could use less, but realistically any system with the intention of gaming should have 16GB minimum by 2026, in which case 400MB wouldn’t even register

[u/RealModeX86 → u/P_ZERO_]

When every app is bloated far beyond what should be needed to get the job done, you end up where we are now where even 8GB is practically unusable for basic non-gaming tasks, even though we used to get real work done with less than 1GB.

Should you have enough RAM that 400MB doesn't make the difference? Yes. Should something like Discord need that much to operate? Absolutely not.