32 gig would be my choice but only with 2 sticks.  I would give 16 gig to Windows alone.  The cost of a 16 gig stick is a pittance these days.

Cheers

bs

If you ever do need more than 16GB of ram it will be a situation like holding short at O'Hare in a thunderstorm with AI maxed out in a 747 on a 4K screen with ultra settings whilst streaming at the same time ...  not tootling around the corn belt in a 172 on a cloud free day admiring the scenery.

My first PC in 1996 had 16 MB of SDRAM, ah the good ole days...

This thing seems to scale well with what you have, which is what matters. I see only around 8 to 9GB of my 16GB used, and 3GB of my 6GB of VRAM. Even taking settings to ultra come nowhere near saturating it, in fact, it makes little difference to how much is consumed. Maybe if I flew over vast cities, which I don't as a bush flyer, I would see greater consumption, but I clearly need no more than 16gb at the moment.

On 9/22/2020 at 2:22 PM, canadiantree said:

My first PC in 1996 had 16 MB of SDRAM, ah the good ole days...

😳  that was a BEAST!! 
I got a 486DX4 with 8 gig.. had to save-up for months to afford that, but after that MSFS  ran at a glórious 15fps  @ 1024x768 with everything on ‘high’  including that balloon at O’hare...  I miss my balloon... 😢   😛

Somehow I never got beyond that mindset that in a sim, èverything above 15 to 20 was fantàstic. I’m still stoked when I see 35 to 45 fps in my overlay, and have to chuckle for a bit when I hear ‘serious gamers’ complain that they cannot get more than 60fps @ 1080p 

32GB Minimum and would postulate the faster the RAM the better...

On 9/21/2020 at 3:18 PM, curbz said:

Bought another 16GB for a total of 32GB - installed, made no difference, uninstalled and sent back for a refund.

meaningless without other specs and performance bottleneck analysis/metric

3 hours ago, Flyfaster said:

32GB Minimum and would postulate the faster the RAM the better...

I would add that you should not OC your ram to avoid the hassles.  Just buy good quality parts.

Cheers

bs

I have almost the same specs as the OP - Ryzen 5 w/1660 SUPER

I upgraded from 16GB to 32GB (hey, RAM was cheap!)

I noticed slight improvement in performance.  My RAM usage usually hovered around 15.5 GB and sometimes over 16GB.  I feel it gives my system a little more headroom and future proofs it a bit. 

I did add the extra RAM before the last patch - so my comparisons are not precise but I get good FPS/performance @high (some ultra/medium) in bush planes and other GA aircraft.  

So slight improvement in my book.  I'll be updating my GPU next year or so... My 1660 Super is running fine with a slight pre-defined manufacturer overclock. Hoping direct x 12 will help it some when it is implemented.

Edited September 26, 20205 yr by windseer

At the release version I did notices a difference between 16 and 32 because I had a module go bad right after release. Load times where better with 32 vs 16 also I frequently noticed usage above 16 GB.

But after the patches running just the sim. Usage was a bit better. However now that I've got Pilot2ATC, NaviGraph, and some other small utilities running with SimConnect working. I almost always use 16+ GB of ram.

If you are just planning on using the base sim and are looking to do it as cheap as possible don't bother. If your going to run 3rd party add-ons and 16 more GB of ram is not going to break the bank I say go for it.

I'm willing to bet that "study level" add-on aircraft will benefit from the extra ram.