The 18 GB RAM of the ASUS ROG 5 Ultimate is crazy but amazing

Yip. The new ASUS Republic of Gamers Phone 5 Ultimate (it’s a mouthful) has up to 18 GB RAM under the hood. It’s enough to store more than 19 billion ASCII characters if you’ve written the longest email ever, or even enough to play Cyberpunk 2077 with Ray Tracing enabled if it’s on your video card, so it’s a lot.

Unnecessary? ✔️ Cool anyway? ✔️

It’s also completely unnecessary, but so very cool. Don ‘t ask me why I’m so cool, because I do not really have an answer other than’you can have 18 GB of RAM in a phone and that’s so cool!‘but I know there are at least a few people out there who agree with me.

Enough about the cooling factor. The real question is how practical it is to have 18 GB of RAM in a phone, no matter if it is sold as a game phone. The one is easy to answer – it’s not practical at all, not even a little bit. And I’m not just talking, because you can easily see how well something like a Galaxy S21 or any of the other best Android phones do everything you want them to do with less.

It’s not really the amount of memory that makes the ROG 5 Ultimate a ‘gaming’ phone, it’s things like a very high 300Hz touch speed and excellent cooling options that make the processor work longer with a higher clock speed. No matter what Android game you play, you will have RAM left over for other phone things to keep working still got very free and untouched.

Android does not use RAM as you probably think.

At least now, and that may be important. RAM in your Android phone is used differently than on any other desktop computer, even a gaming computer, and as things continue to progress, more of it is used before your phone first launches. I’m taking a look at how your phone uses RAM as a quick fix.

While starting your phone, RAM is used to hold core processes and threads, and external core modules once unpacked. That RAM is taken and can never be freed. RAM also keeps the actual cellular radio files in memory, as well as some system-level tools that should always work, and it also gets a dedicated portion of RAM that you can not use.

Not all memory is available.

The GPU (it’s inside the SoC, but there’s a separate GPU on the chip), also gets RAM so it can work, and you can ‘t use the RAM either. Finally, you need a bit of RAM to keep Android running itself, because the operating system has a lot of utilities and apps that need it to work.

Once your phone is up and running and you have unlocked it, you can see that 1-3 GB of RAM has been locked away and you can do nothing about it unless you touch root permissions. This is why even Google had to add more RAM to its Pixel phones because things like the camera took too long to charge.

Next is how Android management system RAM. While using your phone, the apps you use most often are stored in memory, whether they are active or suspended. Not because the system learns what you want, but because the more you use an app, the more it is pushed to the top of a kind of ‘kill list’ used to shut down apps to free up more RAM.

The more you use an app, the longer it sits at the top of the list of apps to stay alive.

For example, if you use Instagram a lot, you probably check it a lot throughout the day. Each time you open it and create the active foreground program, it’s at the top of the list. Programs that you have not used for a while remain lower and the lowest programs on the list are turned off first.

This is a general overview and of course it is much more complicated, but that is the core of it. RAM that is ‘free’ in Android may not be really useless, but the system has no problem killing everything that is dead to make more room for something new. Before phone manufacturers put in ‘extra’ RAM, we’d see apps being killed if we didn’t want them killed, and that’s why.

It also has nothing to do with phones killing programs to save battery power, which is stupid, and Huawei, One Plus, Samsung, Nokia, etc. Should be ashamed of themselves for doing so as a better alternative is built into Android itself.

Know this 1) You may not use all the RAM in your phone, and 2) It is assumed that RAM on Android is mostly used to contain applications, and you can begin to see why it can be beneficial if you use a measure of it. Not that you need 18 GB of it, but a little extra can not hurt.

18 GB RAM means you can have as many Chrome tabs as you want. But not really.

Here things can get all sorts of fun. Note that the ROG 5 Ultimate has about 10 GB of RAM that you do not really need, but which you can still use. A large, fine 3D game from Google Play, for example GRID Autosport, requires about 4 GB to make it work comfortably. Now you have 6 GB of remaining RAM that you can use before Android has to kill anything to make more memory space.

Playing two 3D graphics intensive games simultaneously in a split screen is not practical (and can not happen because most are hard-core to use full screen), but replaces YouTube and Chrome and Instagram for games. Chances are you’ll open your favorite app if you restart your phone and never have to restart it, because it’s instantly live. RAM is fast so.

On top of that, it’s so damn future. Android without running third-party apps requires 512 MB (not GB, MB) to run, but it is really necessary the least 2GB to work well. This is because apps start working as soon as you unlock your phone, even if we do not want it to happen. Android 1.6 ran well with the huge 192 MB of RAM on the T-Mobile G1 when it was released in 2008. Today you need 2 GB and you probably want at least 4 or 6 GB. More who knows.

Source: Bethesda Softworks

Programs are also getting bigger and memory-hungry. Then there is always at least one app you want to use that is buggy and eats RAM for no reason. If you have 18 GB of it, you never have to worry about it again. By the time you need 18 GB RAM, the ROG 5 Ultimate will be a memory of recycled parts or something that lives in your junk drawer, and the latest ROG phone probably has 32 GB RAM.

Now it is cool.

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