Steam gamers finally catching on to the need for 32GB RAM, they'll soon outnumber 16GB holdouts

32GB is becoming the new 16GB when it comes to the amount of memory that Steam gamers have inside their PCs.

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Of course, for a long time, 16GB was seen as a sufficient amount of system RAM for gaming, but those times have changed, and now anyone building a new rig to enjoy big-name PC games equips it with 32GB (or even more, perhaps).

That's now being reflected in the Steam hardware survey, and as Tom's Hardware points out, there's a shift underway towards a 32GB RAM loadout - meaning this is likely to be the most popular memory configuration before too long.

As of the August survey, 36.46% of Steam denizens run with 32GB of RAM, which is up 1.31% from the previous month. That compares to 41.88% who are using 16GB, so there's only a 5% difference now.

If we imagine some similar leaps over the coming months, it's not difficult to guess that 32GB will be the most popular choice for Steam gamers perhaps in five or six months' time - so maybe around March 2026. At some point next year, 32GB will surely take the memory crown on Valve's gaming platform (and likely in the first half of the year).

The rise of 32GB

My PC is getting a bit long in the tooth and I foolishly plumped for only 16GB when I purchased it, when I really should have known better. Early this year, though, I upgraded to 32GB (yes, I need to update the PC specs in my bio) - it didn't cost much at all, so in the end, it was no biggie.

I expect a fair few people are in the same boat as me, and of course, as noted, anyone buying a new PC is going to be grabbing 32GB if they want to play games. The rise of 32GB is surely going to be swift from here.

These days, 16GB is considered the minimum memory pool you should be looking at in a graphics card for any kind of real future-proofing. Speaking of VRAM, just over 28% of Steam gamers have a GPU with 12GB or more - and about a third of those (9%) have 16GB or more, in case you were curious about that side of the memory equation.

As ever, the Steam hardware survey is an interesting resource, with the illuminating nugget on the GPU front being that NVIDIA's Blackwell offerings, particularly the RTX 5070 and RTX 5060, are seeing solid levels of adoption - but rival AMD RDNA 4 graphics cards still nowhere to be seen. Team Red has a pricing problem there, it would seem, in terms of RX 9000 models being above the MSRP, by quite a way in some cases.