Should I get 16GB or 8GB worth of ram for Civ 6

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Sartre311

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Current rig

Motherboard msi 760 gm-p23 (fx) 1333mhz max ddr3 ram 100mbps Lan USB 2.0
Cpu:Amd FX-4300 Quad Core @ base 3.8GHz overclock to 4 GHz
Gpu:R7 240 low profile @2gbs vram
Ram: ddr3 16 or 8gb?
Os:Windows 10 64bit
HDD:WD blue 500gb
Psu:Evga 400 watt
Case:Corsair carbide 100r silent edition
Cpu cooler:Cooler master hyper 212 evo

So RAM will be a Christmas present so price won't be the main consideration for deciding between 16GB or 8GB of RAM . My question is:

1. Will civilization 6 even utilize more then 6GB worth of RAM in total at any given point? I'm talking in late era play, keep in mind the OS will be utilizing around 2GB at most.

2. If civilization 6 can or will at any point utilize more than 6GB worth of ram are there any bottlenecks in my system that would prohibit me from getting to that point where the game could utilize that much RAM?

I know the recommended specs for RAM say 8+

Thanks in advance
 
Your bottleneck will be your GPU regardless of RAM choice so I would say 8GB is certainly sufficient.

I don't think that GPU will cope with max settings either, it has fairly limited throughput. Certainly you'd need to disable AA to get a decent framerate.
 
AriochIV said:
I don't know of any games, Civ VI included, that really benefit from more than 8 GB RAM.
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Gal civ 3 does.

with that said more ram would benefit larger maps and more civs, although will not help turn times.

Once really big mods, with 3d models come out you would like the more ram
 
Hajee said:
Gal civ 3 does.

with that said more ram would benefit larger maps and more civs, although will not help turn times.

Once really big mods, with 3d models come out you would like the more ram
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That's what I'm thinking, more civs, larger maps and future mods. Have any of you guys come anywhere close to going over 6GB in any of your games especially those of you that play on large maps?

What is the typical memory utilization for those who've done benchmarking in late era games with lots of action going on?
 
I can't see having more memory than Civ VI would currently use ever hurting, but getting the VRAM upgraded from 2GB to 4GB is much higher priority than boosting regular RAM from 8 GB to 16.
 
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Huge map, 12 civs remaining, Information Era. It should also be noted that as I have 16GB my standing OS reservation is ~3.5GB compared to ~2.5GB with 8GB.

As I said above, you will get 0 benefit above 8GB and memory is not going to be your issue with that build, the GPU will. Essentially you are worrying about a go-faster stripe when the issue is that your engine is underpowered and no amount of paint-work is going to help that.
 
AriochIV said:
I don't know of any games, Civ VI included, that really benefit from more than 8 GB RAM.
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It depends more on what else they like running.

@OP:

While you don't "need" 16GB of RAM exclusively for Civilisation VI, it will help alt-tabbing between intensive programs as well as alleviate any issues with constantly-running services and programs like Steam, Origin, browsers, etc. I'd recommend it on the grounds that the extra 8GB of RAM won't cost you as much as upgrading any other component in your machine.

So, go for it. Though you might want to look at upgrading the GPU in future.
 
In all honesty I bought this machine to replace my 3 GB 2.33 GHz dual core MacBook Pro so that I can play civ 4 caveman to cosmos. I picked up the machine for $200 it originally had 8 gigs of RAM but upon closer inspection I found that one of the 4gig sticks had died so in order to free up and have a full three gigs of RAM dedicated to the game I want to upgrade my ram to do so. This GPU will be just fine for playing C2C the questions targeted at civ 6 were to determine whether I could run that game with this rig albeit probably not at Max settings.

Now I would love to play civ 6 but it sounds like it's going to be a while until the AI is at a point where it's playable on single player, so if I'm upgrading the RAM I wanted to see where I stood as far as approaching civ 6 in the future.

Given that I need RAM right now putting that money into the gpu on top of that would defeat the purpose of spending as little as possible to get a functional machine for my purposes especially since I think it will play it as is when it comes to civ 6 and I think I'd also need to upgrade my power supply if I were to upgrade the GPU I believe.
 
Sartre311 said:
In all honesty I bought this machine to replace my 3 GB 2.33 GHz dual core MacBook Pro so that I can play civ 4 caveman to cosmos. I picked up the machine for $200 it originally had 8 gigs of RAM but upon closer inspection I found that one of the 4gig sticks had died so in order to free up and have a full three gigs of RAM dedicated to the game I want to upgrade my ram to do so. This GPU will be just fine for playing C2C the questions targeted at civ 6 were to determine whether I could run that game with this rig albeit probably not at Max settings.

Now I would love to play civ 6 but it sounds like it's going to be a while until the AI is at a point where it's playable on single player, so if I'm upgrading the RAM I wanted to see where I stood as far as approaching civ 6 in the future.

Given that I need RAM right now putting that money into the gpu on top of that would defeat the purpose of spending as little as possible to get a functional machine for my purposes especially since I think it will play it as is when it comes to civ 6 and I think I'd also need to upgrade my power supply if I were to upgrade the GPU I believe.
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The above is very well considered and I wouldn't disagree with any of your reasoning. You have hardware for a purpose and you are looking into value additions to that as opposed to any kind of rebuild. You do say above that you do not have to pay for the RAM yourself so value may not be the primary consideration, in which case 16 is a bigger number than 8 and more is rarely worse than less. Strictly from that value perspective though, it's genuinely not something you'll actually use much, if at all, with that specific setup.

If at some point in the future you are looking to get one more generation of games out of that rig then the only decent GPU you'll be able to slot right in is the GeForce 1050 Ti, which has a very low power footprint and doesn't require extra connectors. It's not a brilliant card but it's cheap, puts up solid scores in terms of price/performance and will happily run most current gen games at 1080p, max settings. For comparisons sake it has about 5 times the overall throughput of your current GPU.
 
Considering how cheap RAM is, if we're talking about a machine you're gaming on, get yourself 16GB. While the game itself doesn't need it, you will really see the benefit when you multi-task.
 
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