Game uses 16gb of RAM

[david.]

New PC, all upgraded. Game uses 16gb of RAM. Is that... Normal? Store page has 8gb recommended. Double usage seems excessive.

[desaix]

I've seen people report the game using as much as 19gb. I suspect it's designed to WORK with as few as 8, but if you have more RAM it will take advantage of that to perform better.

A word of caution -- if you're using a 13th or 14th generation Intel processor, it might mishandle high-RAM-demanding games (which CK3 qualifies as) and cause frequent crashes. It's a recently-discovered firmware issue (misdiagnosed as a GPU issue, as the crash report typically refers to graphics card RAM, which is why it's gone undetected for so long), not Paradox's fault, but word doesn't seem to have gone around about it, yet. It's gotten a lot of people very angry at a lot of (both good and bad) game developers for over a year, with gamers getting angry and accusing said developers of being 'lazy' and 'not fixing their game' (even though they CAN'T fix Intel's Firmware, themselves, and it was only a couple months ago anyone recognized what the real issue was), and (at least for this one issue) they haven't deserved any of it.

[Ēarendel]

It's because Paradox hasn't given any optimization updates since release. They kept adding DLC's or bugfixes and the game is unstable, especially when being modded. Eats up ram really fast, especially when you have multiple save games in your folder.