Overall RAM in your systems HAS been steadily increasing, it's just targeted at the use cases where that matters, so it's primarily been in things like the GPU

Overall RAM in your systems HAS been steadily increasing, it's just targeted at the use cases where that matters, so it's primarily been in things like the GPU rather than system memory. In the past ten years GPUs have gone from ~3GB[1] to now 24GB[2] in high-end consumer cards. Another factor is in speed; In that ten year span we went from DDR3 to DDR5, moving from 17000 to 57600 transfers per second over that time frame. SSDs are much more common meaning it's easier to keep RAM full of only the things you need at the moment and drop what you don't out. In terms of RAM density increasing, I think it's been more driven by demand than anything and there simply isn't a serious demand out there except in the very high end server space. Even compute is more driven by GPU than system memory, so you're mostly talking about companies that want to run huge in-memory databases, versus in the past when the entire industry has been starving for more memory density. The story has been speed matters more. I'd also suggest that improvements in compression and hardware-assisted decompression for video streams have made a difference, as whatever is in memory on your average consumer device is smaller. Coupling this with efficiency improvements of things like DirectStorage where the data fed into the GPU doesn't even need to touch RAM, the requirement to have high system memory available will be further lessened for gaming or compute workloads going forward. [1]: https://www.anandtech.com/bench/GPU12/372 https://www.anandtech.com/bench/GPU12/372 [2]: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/graphics-cards/30-series/rtx-3090-3090ti/ https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/graphics-cards/30-serie...