Back in May, Microsoft previously removed a different support page from its Learning Center that recommended 32GB of RAM for gaming on Windows 11 machines. In that page, Microsoft said 16GB was the baseline while 32GB was the “no worries” upgrade.
Both of these now-removed pages claimed that 32GB of RAM was needed for the best Windows 11 experience… which is no longer a fitting recommendation given the current state of the hardware market. With exorbitant hikes pushing RAM prices way up beyond the reach of everyday consumers—all thanks to AI data centers gobbling up all the RAM, storage, and GPUs they can get their hands on—it now costs over $250 for 32GB of DDR4 and over $400 for DDR5.
As of now, Microsoft hasn’t actually done anything to fundamentally improve the memory requirements and efficiency of Windows 11. You still need at least 16GB of RAM for a reasonably responsive experience, and 32GB if you want a great experience for years to come. Microsoft’s solution? To simply remove its 32GB recommendations from its Windows Learning Center pages.
To be fair, Microsoft recently announced that it wants to make Windows 11 less painful to use on 8GB of RAM. Whether that materializes—and how soon—is still to be seen. The move coincides with Microsoft’s recently launched “budget”-tier Surface Pro and Surface Laptop, which both offer only 8GB of RAM in their base configurations. That combined with Microsoft’s secret “Windows K2” project for improving performance on Windows 11 might actually help.
Meanwhile, Windows 10 copes a lot better with less RAM than Windows 11 does, which might be one of the many reasons why so many users are still hanging onto Windows 10 PCs.