For me the answer is 847 USD over 14 years …

      • zikzak025@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        2
        ·
        7 days ago

        The PS3, which had hardware a bit ahead of the curve when it launched in late 2006, had a whopping 512MB of RAM.

        So 2GB would have been relatively beefy specs in comparison when The Orange Box released the following year. 4GB would be excessive.

        I recall the PC I built in 2011 for Skyrim had 4GB of RAM and I thought that was great at the time. A lot of games (Skyrim included) were 32-bit applications at launch and were limited in terms of the total RAM they could utilize, so 4GB was the cap for a lot of titles until 64-bit support became more commonplace.

        • DevDave@piefed.social
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          2
          ·
          7 days ago

          Jesus christ I forgot what dark times those were. Just checked and indeed min memory was 512MB for Half life 2

          Goddamn kids these days don’t know how good they got it (ignoring all the other stuff going on right now)

          • zikzak025@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            1
            ·
            6 days ago

            I remember the first PC I built to play Elder Scrolls 3 Morrowind, which I installed to my amazing 40GB hard drive. I think Morrowind alone ended up using 10GB of that with all the mods I had.

            My current computer has 32GB of RAM, so I have almost as much RAM as I used to have storage back then. I could save Morrowind plus mods onto a RAM disk if I wanted to and just play the whole thing on memory.

            • DevDave@piefed.social
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              1
              ·
              6 days ago

              When I was a kid, we used to have to walk uphill, in snow, somehow both ways, to figure out which voodoo configuration of DMA, IRQ, and free vs high memory settings was needed to be able to play a game.

    • Hakuso
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      2
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      7 days ago

      Sitting at 1.4, right now, which is more than every other part of my system unless I’m using plasma crap on the desktop.

      That’s double Heroic, more than Heroic and Itch put together, and you could almost throw in Luitris (Before I dumped it thanks to Claude) and still use less RAM than Steam.

      Maybe they just suck at Linux? You’d think not, since they pretty much own the backend now with proton, but it’s sure the least efficient and most obnoxious piece of software I have dealt with.

        • Hakuso
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          2
          arrow-down
          1
          ·
          7 days ago

          Currently running at, meaning at that exact moment, in the background with no game playing or service running.

          This, for those who have trouble with the English language, means that it is a current snapsot of usage not a record drain on resources.

          • TrickDacy@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            2
            ·
            7 days ago

            I understand that, I just don’t see much reason for it to vary wildly unless it’s processing shaders or something which wouldn’t really be a fair reading of its resource usage.

            • Hakuso
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              1
              ·
              6 days ago

              Honestly think Steam should run a daemon, not a client. Their store is just fine in a browser, not everything needs to have integrated everything in it.

              Same for GOG, though, Galaxy is a hog but unlike Steam it is optional. Comet does everything Galaxy needs to do, for almost no resource usage, and there could be something similar for Steam put together by valve by the end of the week if they chose to do it.