If a game needs x ram and a PC only has x ram, what happens when you try to play it?
In: Technology
You get swapping, where the computer writes out unused parts of the memory to disk to make more room. If any of that is needed again, then it’ll load it back from disk.
Swapping is slow, and if it happens a lot you’ll notice things slowing down. It’s especially bad with a normal hard disk, but even SSDs still give a noticeable performance hit.
How bad it is depends on much under the required amount you are. Swapping works great when there’s unused stuff that can be moved out of the way, but if it ever happens that the amount of data you’re working on exceeds the amount of available memory, the system tends to grind to a halt. That’s because it tries to make room, but in doing so kicks out something that’ll be needed very soon from the RAM, so then when it needs it again there will be yet more swapping, and so on.
Think of it as cooking in too small of a kitchen — if you have a bit less room than ideal, then that can be coped with. You move rarely needed things somewhere out of the way, and make space. But if you try cooking for the whole family when you have room for just one thing at a time, then your work will grind to a halt because you’ll be moving stuff around all day and getting very little cooking done.
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