If a game needs x ram and a PC only has x ram, what happens when you try to play it?
In: Technology
Assuming the application doesn’t have a hard coded RAM check that prevents it from launching…
Your PC will begin a process called swapping where unneeded blocks of memory will be copied to your hard drive for temporary storage (pagefile)
This process is however extraordinarily slow compared to the speed that RAM operates at so the game will run unbearable slow if at all.
RAM recommendations are more about playability and performance. A game will usually work with less RAM, but will be slow or freeze up temporarily, making it hard to play normally.
More specifically, when a computer runs out of RAM, it takes some memory you haven’t used for a while and writes it to disk, freeing the space it was using. When it needs something from that memory, it has to write some other memory to disk and read that memory back again. This is known as swapping, and because disk reads and writes are hundreds of times slower than RAM too much swapping can bring a computer to its knees.
It’s been answered. But just to say that X equals X. You want two different letters to stand for two different values. So the computer would have X ram, and the game requires Y ram.
You get swapping, where the computer writes out unused parts of the memory to disk to make more room. If any of that is needed again, then it’ll load it back from disk.
Swapping is slow, and if it happens a lot you’ll notice things slowing down. It’s especially bad with a normal hard disk, but even SSDs still give a noticeable performance hit.
How bad it is depends on much under the required amount you are. Swapping works great when there’s unused stuff that can be moved out of the way, but if it ever happens that the amount of data you’re working on exceeds the amount of available memory, the system tends to grind to a halt. That’s because it tries to make room, but in doing so kicks out something that’ll be needed very soon from the RAM, so then when it needs it again there will be yet more swapping, and so on.
Think of it as cooking in too small of a kitchen — if you have a bit less room than ideal, then that can be coped with. You move rarely needed things somewhere out of the way, and make space. But if you try cooking for the whole family when you have room for just one thing at a time, then your work will grind to a halt because you’ll be moving stuff around all day and getting very little cooking done.
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