Recently I downloaded Chrome for some testing that I wanted to let separate from my Firefox browser. After a while I realized my computer was always getting hot every time I opened chrome. I took a look at the system monitor: chrome was using 30% of of my CPU power to play a single YouTube video in the background. What the fuck? I ended up switching the testing environment over the libreWolf and CPU load went down to only 10%.
I usually find myself either capping out the 8GB of RAM on my laptop, or getting close to it if I have Firefox, Discord and a word processor open. Especially if I have Youtube or Spotify going.
Most of that is discord, they can't manage a single good thing right
Use more GPU than the game I'm playing? Check.
Have an inefficient method of streaming a game? Check.
Be laggy as fuck when no longer on GPU acceleration when lemmy and guilded is fine? Check.
Yep. I work in IT support, almost entirely Windows but similar concepts apply.
I see people pushing 6G+ with the OS and remote desktop applications open sometimes. My current shop does almost everything by VDI/remote desktop.... So that's literally the only thing they need to load, it's just not good.
On the remote desktop side, we recently shifted from a balanced remote desktop server, over to a "memory optimised" VM, basically has more RAM but the same or similar CPU, because we kept running out of RAM for users, even though there was plenty of CPU available... It caused problems.
Memory is continually getting more important.
When I do the math on the bandwidth requirements to run everything, the next limit I think we're likely to hit is RAM access speed and bandwidth. We're just dealing with so much RAM at this point that the available bandwidth from the CPU to the RAM is less than the total memory allocation for the virtual system. Eg: 256G for the VM, and the CPU runs at, say, 288GB/s....
Luckily DDR 4/5 brings improvements here, though a lot of that stuff has yet to filter into datacenters
Heavily depends on what you use, on a Linux server as a NAS I'm able to get away with 2gb, an orange pi zero 3 1gb but it essentially only ever ones one app at a time.
Im sure a hardcore rgb gamer could need 32gb pretty quick by leaving open twitch streams, discord, a couple games in the background, a couple chrome tabs open all on windows 11