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To be honest, RAM amount is far from being relevant on the Steam Deck. RAM speed is what's crucially limiting it, and even a minor overclock gives noticeable improvements.
Adding new Samsung chips to achieve 32GB isn't that relevant. Adding new chips that can sustain higher clocks and overclocking... Now we are talking.
The GPU is integrated and uses system RAM as VRAM. Increasing the available VRAM should improve performance in titles with lots of high-res textures.
Yes, I know - it's an APU.
But you're incorrect - adding more RAM to be allocated as VRAM is useless if the GPU isn't making use of it. In the case of the Steam Deck, it has been demonstrated quite a few times that the main bottleneck is the memory speeds. Even a slight overclock gives significant boosts in performance, it's quite surprising in fact.
You and that other technological genius are wrong. The device ships with 8GB of RAM and tools like CryoUtilities allow for more of that to allocated to the GPU framebuffer. This allows for measurably better performance. Cryo does this by increasing allocated GPU VRAM and enabling more swapping of RAM to disk, thereby giving the deck more usable VRAM.
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You are both rather uninformed. RAM can enable games to use more c library headers and avoid stack smashing by way of the UPC bussing through the central wafer. The reason why valve doesn't use this bus path like they CAN is because the propagation delay is not even close to being a bottleneck on the lesser capacity chip but when you have 32gb chip, for example, the sequential NAND configuration doesn't do any better at allocating memory because the pointers aren't using malloc() in the transport layer anymore.
You okay there, buddy? Not smelling any burnt toast, right?
wtf did I just read?
I'm not wrong I just skipped a step in describing the value of having more RAM you egotistical cumstain.. Cryo33 doesn't just recommended increasing the GPU allocation in the recovery tools he practically states it's a must.
And it's really telling how practically every other x86 handheld starts at 16GB but please do shit on the basic premise that we should have more RAM because it's so fundamentally flawed.
I'll chime in and say all three of you are wrong and I refuse to elaborate further.
Uh, actually RAM amount is the difference between some games being playable or not at all, and there are plenty of game issues related to insufficient/low memory
On the Steam Deck? I've never heard anyone mention the amount of memory being the bottleneck on there.
How many people would actually be able to or take time to diagnose that versus "it started stuttering/crashed so I had to restart the game" ?
If you're going to "uh, actually" me, do us a favor and show me a game not running on the Steam Deck due to lack of RAM.
Not the OP, but it's decently well documented that there are games out there that are having a tough time with the memory constraints of the Steam Deck's 16 GB: https://youtu.be/z94TcihZxME?t=145
Now I'll grant that maybe it's a memory leak in TLoU that would cause you to still run into issues regardless of maximum memory but 16 GB is the recommended minimum and is starting to be the minimum recommended for other newer games and that's without having a chunk set aside for VRAM, so I'd bet that you'd see decent performance gains just by increasing the available RAM without it running at higher clocks.
The list of games that want combined RAM/VRAM in excess of 16GB is steadily increasing*, if there were an easy means of getting my Steam Deck to 32 GB, I'd jump on it. I haven't had less than 32 GB in my desktop daily driver since 2017 and honestly the 64 GB I have now starts to feel anemic once you've got a VM or two running with Chrome and a game all having to contend for the same resources. Honestly, I've never felt like I had too much memory, but I have definitely felt it performance wise when I don't have enough, where things start to stutter and the frame pacing goes all to hell while things are shuffled in and out of memory. Speed isn't nothing, but there is definitely an increasing argument to be made for quantity as well.
*
- https://store.steampowered.com/app/1716740/STARFIELD/
- https://store.steampowered.com/app/990080/Hogwarts_Legacy/
- https://store.steampowered.com/app/1282100/Remnant_II/
- https://store.steampowered.com/app/1649240/Returnal/
- https://store.steampowered.com/app/1680880/Forspoken/
- https://store.steampowered.com/app/2124490/SILENT_HILL_2/
- https://store.steampowered.com/app/1888930/The_Last_of_Us_Part_I/
Not even sure why you guys are arguing. All of this can boil down to:
- More RAM is beneficial, especially when it's shared by the CPU and GPU.
- The biggest bottleneck for most games on the Steam Deck is probably not RAM/VRAM, though.
- Faster memory will probably improve performance more than more memory.
- All of this is entirely dependent on the game or application you're running.
But the biggest point should be:
- Good fucking luck desoldering and soldering BGA memory chips by hand.
It's not that the RAM hungry ones don't run, it's that they fill up the RAM and create stuttering - sometimes even with a big page file. Emulators can do this, for example.
And more RAM is particularly good because the CPU and GPU pull from the same pool of RAM in the device.
I'm supposed to prove a negative? Do you want me to show a video of games crashing
Games that scale up with play (more players, growing environments, etc) tend to use more RAM over time, and especially such games with mods benefit from more RAM.
Anno, various building/construction games like Cities, Arm, DCS, Warzone whatever. Plenty of games will run with 8-16GB but run better with more. Yes, you can play the game with the "required" specs but that doesn't mean they run great, and CPU/GPU isn't always the bottleneck in larger environments.
I played through GoW on Deck but it definitely had a memory leak that would cause crashing after a bit. More RAM would have extended the play time despite that issue, and I've a couple other titles where the odd crash is likely for similar reasons.
Your being asked to prove a positive.
Your claim is games crash due to ram.
So give an example of a game that crashes due to ram and you are complete.
Proving a negative would be saying no games crash due to ram, and being asked to prove that.
The amount of bad logic in use by everyone in this post has me wondering how people even get to work in the mornings
a well modded cities skylines can take 64gb or more of ram.
I literally did give an example, so now you're just being dickish.
GoW (God of War) had - possibly still has, I haven't checked recently - a memory leak condition. Over time, it will start to stutter out and eventually freeze. TLOU apparently also has/had this issue, though I haven't picked that one up yet myself.
More RAM extends the time one can play but in some cases may also get one past a "hump" to the point where it can do collection and reclaim RAM.
In the case of GoW it seems to be a VRAM issue, but since the Deck uses an APU both system and video memory are allocated from the same pool. That also means that one needs to consider VRAM usage overall in terms of performance, as a game that works well with 16GB on a desktop system with a dedicated GPU (that has dedicated memory) won't actually have 16GB available on the Deck as some of that is allocated to the VRAM pool.
And no, your ask originally was that I prove a game "not running" (which is proving a negative, as the positive version would be "show that game X runs") and then tying it back to RAM. To quote:
do us a favor and show me a game not running on the Steam Deck due to lack of RAM
UH, ACTHUALLGY 🤓☝️
Do you think faster RAM would have a bigger impact than an upgraded GPU?
Nope much better to spend 50€ on a slighty newer cpu/gpu that on a faster speed memory module