Quote Originally Posted by Loony BoB View Post
16-24GB is, for me, stupid. Standard builds come with 2-4GB at the moment. Going by the Best Sellers at dixons.co.uk (a pretty prominent seller in the UK for Joe Average), the best is 3GB and the second best is 2GB. Best Seller for gaming specific section of their site reads up at 6GB, and that's a £1,600 desktop which is insanely expensive to all but the best paid people out there.

If you're going for a custom build, I've not seen anything with 16-24GB out there. I can sort of understand some might go for 8GB or something, but what the hell would you need 16-24GB RAM to run?

If the game is coming out at the end of the year, I'd expect 4GB to be used in less than half of the desktops that are in use throughout the world. For gaming PCs, it'll probably be about standard issue.
I've seen custom builds from companies like Dell, Alienware and HP that offer up to 24GB of RAM and even laptops that offer 8GB of RAM that isn't expensive, and it isn't stupid. Just because you aren't up to date with technology and don't realise that computers aren't just used to look up Facebook and play some games, does not make it stupid. If we kept saying "that's stupid" to newer technology, where would we be?

By the time FFXIV is released, you'll see that 4GB is the bare minimum of RAM you'd need. In fact, right now to have anything lower is laughable. Especially those on a 32-bit OS and running a 512MB-1GB GPU which counts along side it (meaning you'd really only be getting 3GB RAM).

In fact, the next upgrade I'll be doing will be around the 24GB RAM mark. I need it for my rendering, and it helps a tremendous amount! (I'm a character animator, but I also freelance which means I need to do lighting and rendering which will take up all of that 24GB).

So where does Square draw the line? Do they have to make their next big thing to a 5 year old game because the average joe doesn't know about computers? There is nothing wrong with pushing the limits, and they won't break their market (I'm pretty sure they have more educated and skillful people doing research for them than us). They still have the PS3 as an option and if you look at all the FFXIV fansites (and MMORPG forums in general) you'll see most MMO players upgrade their computers a hell of a lot, and most are willing to buy a completely new system when FFXIV is released.

Of course, there are going to be many options to turn on and off to be able to get it to run on lower specs. It just won't look nearly as pretty. And me personally, I'd love to run it in 1080p with all settings maxed!