Over the years, video games have evolved to the point where everything looks and feels very realistic. From ray-tracing to cinematic VR experience, they certainly make you feel like you’re there enjoying the moment yourself when you’re playing these games.
But they have also brought a big issue for most gamers, and that is, they need a lot of resources to run well. As everyone doesn’t have the luxury of having a gaming PC, these gaming upgrades really hurt those who just play video games for fun.
If you’re one of such people, you must have thought if allocating more RAM to your game will make a difference. If so, then we have all the answers you’re searching for.
As you might already know, all games and programs can allocate as much RAM as they need for themselves. Also, the limit to how much RAM they can allocate to themselves is set by their developers. So, you basically don’t need to do anything when it comes to allocating resources and RAM to your Steam games.
However, having a low specs RAM might also bottleneck your gaming performance. Your PC will automatically allocate more VRAM in case you run out of RAM, but that won’t solve your issue fully. So, if you find that your memory is always full when you open Task Manager while gaming, it might be time to upgrade your RAM.
Hopefully, there are some things you can do to better increase the performance of your PC while you’re gaming. Here is the list of methods that you can try for a better gaming experience on Steam.
Close Background Tasks Before Launching Steam
If you have an old computer with a relatively old processor and slower RAM, make sure that no task is running in the background when you’re launching Steam.
- Right-click on your taskbar, then select Task Manager.
- From the Processes tab, close any programs that are consuming a lot of resources (such as Google Chrome and Spotify).
- You can close a program in Task Manager by right-clicking on the program and selecting the End Task option. Or selecting the program and clicking on the End Task icon.
Set Launch Options on Steam
Launch options help to set boundaries for the game that you are playing. They make sure that the game is running within the specified parameters.
- Open the Steam client app on your PC, then click on the Library tab.
- Now, locate the game that you want to play and right-click on it. Then, select Properties.
- On the General tab, click on the input field under Launch Options.
- Now, put the following commands in the field.
“-refresh 60” (put 144 if the refresh rate of your monitor is 144Hz.)
“-maxMem=8192“
“-high“
“-dx11” (forces your game to run in DirectX11.)
Set High Priority for Your Game in Task Manager
Setting high priority to a game informs your PC to allocate maximum resources when the particular game is launched.
- Launch any Steam game you want to play, then minimize by pressing the Windows key on your keyboard.
- Now, right-click on the taskbar and select Task Manager.
- Click on the Details tab, and right-click your launched game. After that, select Set Priority > High.
Upgrade Your RAM
If you are playing games that demand a lot of resources on an old PC, then you might need to upgrade your RAM for better performance. A lot of modern games require a good graphics card and sufficient RAM to run well even on low settings, so if your RAM isn’t powerful enough, you should try upgrading it.
16GB RAM is enough to run any AAA title smoothly, so you don’t need to go overboard when upgrading it. Also, keep in mind that dual-channel RAM is much better than a single-channel one. So try buying 2x8GB of RAM instead of a single 16GB stick, or 2x4GB instead of a single 8GB of RAM. You also need a good overall system to play most modern games.
