16GB is the new minimum for Rust.

Yes, 16GB will help reduce stuttering in Rust and similar early access games, but it’s not a magic bullet.

Rust is famously a memory hog. It leaks memory like a sieve, and 8GB simply isn’t enough anymore. With 16GB, you give the game room to breathe, which avoids the constant swapping to disk that causes those ugly hitches. Same goes for games like Tarkov or DayZ—they’re poorly optimized and eat RAM for breakfast.

That said, stuttering isn’t always a RAM problem. If your CPU or GPU is bottlenecked, or your storage is slow, you’ll still see stutters. But going from 8GB to 16GB is the single biggest upgrade you can make for these games right now.

Don’t bother with 32GB unless you’re also running a hundred browser tabs. 16GB is the sweet spot.