Steam is one, if not the most famous application every gamer these days have installed in their PC or laptop for gaming.
However, many players encounter performance issues when using Steam, such as super laggy games or low FPS.
Because of this, many gamers are wondering how they can allocate more RAM to Steam Games.
Unfortunately, the answer to those problems is not allocating more RAM to your Steam games.
Let us help you unpack this myth about allocating more RAM to Steam Games in 2021!
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How Do I Allocate More RAM To Steam Games?
Believe it or not, many gamers (including us) believe that getting more RAM will make a better and smoother gaming experience.
But not all of us have the money just to get more RAM to add to our PC.
So we get creative. We think that if we can allocate more of the RAM in our system to the Steam Games can help the gaming performance.
The bad news is you cannot manually allocate more RAM to a specific application or software or a game.
In this case, you cannot manually allocate more RAM from your system to be used by Steam.
Usually, the games or software developers will design their games to allocate or decide how much RAM their games will need.
This game design will, later on, communicate with your Operating System to request for the number of RAM it needs from the remaining RAM you have left.
And this communication process is being done automatically in the background.
Since you cannot allocate more RAM manually to Steam Games, what you can do is free up your RAM usage.
You can do this by merely closing any background applications that might eat up your RAM.
Or you can check out our guide about 16 hacks to make your gaming system run faster for games.
However, we found out that usually, the culprit of your laggy games or low FPS number is not because of the lack of RAM.
The first thing you might want to check is the bottleneck caused by your GPU and CPU combination.
So, allocating more RAM to the programs will not allow a significant performance increase to Steam Games as the game can decide the amount since the developer sets the limitation.
How Do I Allocate More RAM To A Program?
As we stated before, you cannot allocate more RAM to Steam Games manually due to software design in general.
But we found two tricks that might help you so that your overall operating system runs more efficiently.
This trick might help your system to somehow allocate more RAM to a program that you choose.
The first trick is to always the program with the “Run as Administrator” option by right-clicking on your application launcher.
We found that running your program as administrator allows the program to communicate better with your Operating System.
This setting allows your operating system to prioritize said program whenever the OS allocates resources.
The second trick you can try is by setting priority on a program inside your task manager.
Almost the same as the first trick mentioned above, this trick also let your Operating System to know which program gets more priority when your OS allocates its resources.
However, we just want to inform you that these two tricks above will not give a significant performance boost to your program or gaming experience.
These tricks are merely helping your operating system to identify which program needs priority when allocating its resources.
We recommend that you close all programs and applications in the background to free up more RAM so Steam and all its games can get all the RAM it needs.
If you have the budget, go on and add more of your RAM to at least 8GB.
This ensures that you have enough RAM for most games in 2021, especially if you have less than 8GB of RAM.
If you have more budget, consider upgrading to 16GB to have excess space that will allow you to multitask and futureproof your system to a couple of years ahead.
All in all, you cannot allocate more RAM to a specific program, but you might be interested in testing our two tricks.
Or you can just add more RAM to your system.
Or maybe you can just close a couple of applications and software so that you have more RAM now.
How Much RAM Do I Need For Steam Games?
If you want to know how much RAM do you need for Steam Games, our best suggestion is to visit that game on your Steam.
Inside that game information page, you can find the minimum recommended specs suggested by the game maker.
After all, the game maker itself understands their game better than anyone.
They can make suggestions on how much RAM you need for Steam Games better than anyone.
We always suggest that you at least double the minimum requirement.
So when the game maker states that it needs a minimum RAM of 4GB, just double it to 8GB of RAM.
This is to ensure that you have a smooth and enjoyable gaming experience.
However, if you want to ensure your Gaming PC or Gaming Laptop to be able to run most games in 2021, we believe you might need 8GB of RAM for Steam Games.
Consider having 16GB of RAM if you plan to play the game, stream it over twitch, and running other applications in the background.
How Do I Make Games Run Better On Steam?
To make your games run better on Steam, you should first check the game minimum requirement.
Ensure you fulfill all the requirements related to the CPU, GPU, and RAM, even if you only meet the minimum requirements. (We recommend you to have at least 2X what the minimum standards said you would need)
Different games will need different specifications, so make sure you check these pages first.
Secondly, open your task manager and close all unnecessary apps to ensure other programs do not eat up your CPU, GPU, and RAM power.
Thirdly, you should make sure that your system is not throttling or getting very hot because it can significantly affect your performance.
Go read our tips on 5 easy ways to cool your system while gaming.
Lastly, if you still experience issues with your games on Steam, you should consider lowering your game resolution or deactivate some settings inside the game’s visual settings.
Obviously, if you force your PC to run the setting beyond the recommendation, it will affect your FPS.
So lowering your settings should help your gaming performance.
So go and do these four steps to make your games run better on Steam.
Conclusion: How to Allocate More RAM to Steam Games?
In the end, we hope you get the idea that allocating more RAM to Steam Games is not possible to be done manually.
What you can do and what we suggest you to do is to close all unnecessary applications and software running in the background if you have not enough RAM.
Some apps and software running on startup might be eating your RAM and performance, resulting in low FPS and laggy games.
Again, go and read our guide on 16 ways to make your system faster for gaming.
Along with it, we recommend adding more RAM to your system to at least 8GB in 2021.
It is enough to run most games smoothly.
If the budget allows, have at least 16GB of RAM in your system, and you will be happy for the next couple of years.
So there you have it!
We hope it helps you understand more about allocating more RAM to Steam Games in 2021.
