It's a pity you wrote a book because you taught me nothing new.
Yes I know the difference between VRAM an main memory. I was making two separate points unrelated to one another.
I never said 16GB was required. Please quote where I said that?
Both the OS and game are developed to scale when more RAM is available. The more RAM you have the more windows will cache, its scaled on a percentage of the total memory resources available. As with some games, additional textures are stored in the RAM to make use of the available resources irrespective of how much VRAM you have.
If you feel the need to reply with a book again. Please don't.
I didn't ask if you knew the difference between system memory and VRAM, I said the difference between virtual memory and VRAM...because in your previous post you mention virtual memory, which has nothing to do with either system ram or VRAM. I think you're confused. Games do not scale with RAM, if you put 64GB of ram into a system a game is not going to load the entire game into RAM just because it can. Game engines aren't designed that way, the developers design the games so that at any given moment depending on where the player is in the game world there are certain textures loaded based on the immediate game area. Even completely open worlds have what you could call a giant bubble around the player that includes what is currently loaded into memory and could be called on to be rendered.
However, it has nothing to do with how much RAM you have, it has to do with the
settings you select. It's a static amount based on things in your video settings like "view distance" in games like WoW that determine how close you have to be before a texture might be rendered. The higher you put the setting, the more the game loads. If you don't have enough RAM to entirely load it then the system PAGES it and has to swap what is in RAM because there isn't room for what you've selected as a setting, which can cause annoying visual effects like entire mountains popping into view suddenly instead of becoming more clear as you get closer.
You say you don't want me to write books, but you have no idea how this stuff works...so if you don't want to learn DON'T COME HERE AND POST. It's ridiculous that you continue to defend what you post after someone clearly points out that you're mistaken. I'm not sitting here insulting you, I don't even think you're stupid, you're just uninformed and that's OK. You have a lot to learn about this stuff, I'm a professional systems programmer and I've done game development, I know a bit more about the subject that most people.
So if you had a credit card you would have happily spent $700?
This is why American citizens are in debt.
One thing to consider as you move up the resolution ladder the more physical memory is required. You might hit near the 8GB limit on some games at the resolution.
This is where you first mention that 8GB might not be enough.
I've tested Crysis 2, Max Payne 3, and BF3 on a mixture of high/ultra settings without Virtual Memory, in all three games near 6GBs is used, and this is on my tiny monitor and resolution.
The larger the resolution the bigger the frame buffer required for displaying the image.
This is the second time. You've also said in the past that you're running in 1440p which isn't a small resolution. Also, monitor size has nothing to do with anything, only resolution matters. In both of these posts you're implying strongly that 16GB is required for gaming. I've said repeatedly that it isn't, that's how this entire conversation started.