Microsoft has quietly retracted its own documentation that suggested 32GB RAM is the “no worries” upgrade for gaming, and 16GB RAM is the baseline. This support document was likely written using a large language model, and Windows Latest first spotted it before it was taken down. Microsoft also nuked a document that recommended Copilot+ PCs for gaming.

Microsoft has a “Learning Center” where it publishes guides and marketing articles to promote various Windows features, and these rank well in search results. It’s mostly used by Microsoft to push a narrative and also make it easier for users to make a choice when they search the web.

In the first week of April, Microsoft quietly published a support document titled “Gaming features: What the best Windows PC gaming systems have in common.”

At first, the document might appear to be about Windows 11’s gaming features, but it goes a step further and builds a narrative around the memory requirement.

In the support document, Microsoft clearly notes that:

“For most players, 16GB RAM is a practical starting point. Moving to 32GB RAM helps if you run Discord, browsers, or streaming tools alongside your games. That extra memory also gives newer titles more breathing room as memory demands continue to rise.” – Microsoft.

“16GB RAM is the baseline; 32GB is the ‘no worries’ upgrade,” the company concluded in the support document, which was first spotted by Windows Latest.

This was later picked up by other outlets and the gaming community, and it didn’t go well with gamers.

  • andros_rex@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    Ya know, I’d rather just have plain text website designed for 4 gb or less. I’ve never been in the financial position to have 16 gbs, and it’s far worse now. I just want to not be denied access to text because all websites want to secretly run so much JavaScript and all the other shit. Eventually I’ll give up on the web and just be happy on gopher and Gemini.

    • T156@lemmy.world
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      9 hours ago

      We had a rather nice thing going with pure HTML. Sure, it wasn’t the prettiest thing, even with CSS, but almost every device could run and display it in its own way.

      You didn’t need a custom thing, or a bunch of extra code adjusting the webpage for each type of device that opened the web page, since that job was all done by the browser.

    • CanIFishHere@lemmy.ca
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      9 hours ago

      Win11 will go web surfing just fine on 4GB. Things will be a bit snappier if you have more.

    • leftzero@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      20 hours ago

      4 gb or less

      Back in my day 640KB were more than enough for everyone!¹

      1. No they weren’t, but 4MB with expanded memory was luxury and could easily fit any program you threw at it, drivers and all.
      • Regrettable_incident@lemmy.world
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        6 hours ago

        My first computer was a thing called a ZX81 with an amazing 1k RAM. TBF I couldn’t do a huge amount with it. When the BBC B came along with 32k it was an amazing advance. That was a nifty machine, could program in basic and assembly.