Regarding RAM, as I alluded to above I found the single 8GB stick of DDR4 RAM that came as default with my gaming laptop wasn’t nearly enough and loading times were ridiculously long: at least 5 minutes and often significantly more, from an SSD hard drive.
I tried playing around with virtual RAM to no avail, through admittedly there could have been some more fine-tuning I could have done. But as I’d always intended to add more RAM I just bought an additional stick and popped it in. I bought 32GB for a total of 40GB which is totally unnecessary for BG3, but as it wasn’t that expensive at the time thought I might as well future proof. The additional RAM solved my loading times issue.
But from what others have said, for good BG3 performance I suspect you’re going to find yourself wanting to add another 8GB for a total of 16GB. I agree that it doesn’t seem necessary to match exactly, not that I’m an expert. I bought another stick of the same type and speed but a different brand and everything seems fine. (While it looked like there were limits to how much benefit I could get from parallel use of RAM sticks of different sizes, as far as I could tell that was probably going to be outweighed by just having more RAM in total, but wouldn’t be a problem for you anyway if you were going to buy another 8GB).
