Do I really need 8 GB of RAM?

The folks over on the bug forum aren't exactly chatty. Anyway, I’m using my PC to record gameplay through emulators—specifically running stuff on Visual Basic for Applications, Bloomberg, and a PlayStation 2 emulator. The games are about 400MB, the emulators take up maybe 10MB, so everything should sit around 500MB total. The headache is that when I actually start recording, the files balloon up to 2GB easily. So, here's my question: if I push it to 4GB files, is my computer going to start choking? Also, do I really need 8GB of RAM, or is 4GB enough to get by?

Honestly, I wouldn’t overthink it—I’d just go straight for the 8GB of RAM. It’s not like they’re breaking the bank like they used to, right? Especially if you're already running 4GB and just looking to bump things up. Just a quick heads-up though—if you can manage it, try to stick with the same RAM manufacturer you’re currently using...

I just want to know if my PC would start acting up if I go over the 3 GB file size limit. That's really my only concern here.

EDIT:

To give you the full picture, I’ve got three hard drives. One is still under warranty, and the other two are old relics from over five years ago. Here's the deal: I could sell the two old drives plus 4 GB of RAM to fund an upgrade to 8 GB. But there's a catch—if that one drive under warranty dies, I lose all my backups. What would you guys do if you were in my shoes?

Anyone there? 😢 I’m honestly stuck in a bit of a bind here. 😢

From what I gather, most recording software writes straight to the hard drive rather than just sitting in the RAM. The RAM is basically just a temporary buffer during processing before everything gets dumped onto the disk. So, I doubt you'd run into any lag, but honestly, why not just give it a shot?

RAM prices have been pretty low lately, so maybe just save those $50 and grab an extra 4GB if you were already thinking about upgrading anyway.

Alright, I'll give it a shot. 😉 I'm honestly pretty curious to see how this plays out. 😁

You won't have any issues with VBA or PSX. Total usage probably won't even hit 500MB of RAM 😉

If you're running macOS, the system usually opens a swap file when RAM gets tight. Basically, the hard drive acts as a backup for whatever won't fit in memory. I keep my swap enabled by default even though I'm sitting on 8GB of RAM. Maybe macOS wouldn't even consider turning it off until I hit 16GB? At the end of the day, it doesn't really matter—all that matters is how fast you can process data. Reading from a disk is slow, but if you're low on RAM, you don't have much of a choice, do you?