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Dell and Lenovo may limit mid-range laptops to 8GB DDR5 RAM in response to rising memory prices
(www.notebookcheck.net)
this post was submitted on 23 Dec 2025
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Maybe this will be a boon. The entire reason the ram requirements got so high as it is is because software optimization was put on the back burner. Maybe a ram shortage where people can't obtain the ram needed will force the big name software devs to start being more frugal with ram. (talking to you chrome... whom currently is using 2 gigs alone just trying to show a twitch stream...)
Or more realistically be used as an excuse for always online cloud based services a la office 365. "We would let you download the app, but most users don't have the computing power so instead we'll just make this a helpful subscription!"
Idk, trying to load up a couple spreadsheets in Edge is going to consume 8gb of Ram in no time.
"Oh don't worry, you won't have to actually load spreadsheets anymore, just give our AI full access to your files and it will do whatever you ask :)"
Ideally, you're correct though and companies start investing in optimization. I don't see it going that way, but a girl can dream.
Oh fucking hell...
Honestly, it'll be more efficient to have memory in a datacenter in that hardware in a datacenter will see higher average capacity utilization, but it's gonna drive up datacenter prices too.
Not sure I agree. Centralizing storage, and especially memory, creates incredible round trip costs.
As a dirty commie, I agree, but unfortunately under capitalism it is just an avenue for exploitation. Large companies are deciding what we can or cannot have access to and setting the price for it in a manner completely divorced from what they're offering.
That would still pressure the browser teams to work on memory optimizations.
At least one studio, Larian, has confirmed this is the case for them.
Good fuck studios just throwing optimization into the bin cause they can. They should fucking actually do some problem solving instead of brute forcing everything.
How do you take that from the comment above?
Not the person you're responding to, but "most likely, we already need to do a lot of optimization work in early access that we didn't necessarily want to do at that point" indicates to me that optimization was not a top priority. It's not unusual for people to optimize after a proof of concept or something, but I imagine in gaming (I don't do game dev admittedly) you don't want that too late in the process. If they're not planning on having it in early access, then their early consistent user base will be more worried about other things. If min spec is 8 then people with 4 won't get it or won't complain about poor performance because technically it's their machine that's the issue. Lack of complaints about that and feedback about other things further shifts the priority away from optimization. Plus, anyone who's worked in dev spaces or probably any kind of deliverable knows that there are things that just don't happen despite your best intentions. Things like optimization are the first to go in the dev space, so by openly admitting to putting it off, it does feel like an admission of "we were probably just not going to get around to it". In my experience, the further out you plan to optimize, the more man hours you end up wasting, so I don't see a company investing heavily in that at any point, but doing so post early launch seems wasteful if they legitimately cared about it.
Tried that yesterday, 2.6 GB for just that one tab playing a twitch stream. That's honestly impressive.
Keeping it positive, nice.