What is Smartphone Extended RAM and Does it Really Work?

You’ve probably heard about virtual RAM or extended RAM for smartphones before, but have you ever tried it yet?

Extended RAM is a feature that utilizes a smartphone’s internal storage to provide additional RAM. It may come in a different name based on the manufacturer of your phone. For instance, Samsung calls this RAM Plus, Xiaomi refers to this as Memory Extension, and Vivo uses the term Virtual RAM.

This feature will take up some space from a phone’s internal storage and use it as ‘the extended RAM’. If your phone’s storage is almost filled to the brim, you might not be able to use this. Though virtual RAM is not as great as the existing one, it does help ease the work of said existing RAM.

And now the question comes in: Does this Virtual or Extended RAM work? I would say that it does, but you might not see the difference.

With more RAM, more applications in your phone can stay running in the background as the virtual RAM will help take up some work for the existing RAM that your smartphone’s have. Without this, your phone will go through RAM optimization that will stop older apps from running. This is why apps restart when you get back to it after an amount of time.

If you expect it to help your phone’s gaming performance, however, then that’s not the case. This feature does not help any application’s performance, but it will assist in keeping more apps open however.

So, we tested out several implementations of Extended RAM used by various brands baked into their operating system and here’s what we found out:

OPPO Find N2 Flip:
8GB LPDDR5X RAM + 8GB RAM Expansion (ColorOS 13)
Antutu RAM Score: 131,599 (ON), 132,426 (OFF)

OnePlus 11 5G:
16GB LPDDR5X RAM + 12GB RAM Expansion (OxygenOS 13)
Antutu RAM Score: 190,830 (ON), 211,283 (OFF)

Xiaomi 13:
12GB LPDDR5X RAM + 7GB Memory Extension (MIUI 14)
Antutu RAM Score: 232,929 (ON), 238,142 (OFF)

In the three sample phones we tried RAM expansion, we noticed that RAM scores are a little bit higher when RAM expansion is OFF. However, the difference is mostly in the 1-2% and the only biggest difference is with the OnePlus 11.

This means that while the system gets more virtual memory, the read/write speeds of RAM combo is reduced because of the lower performance of the virtualized storage.

Do you need virtual RAM on your smartphone?

If you would like to have multiple applications open in the background, then you should try it. If you play games on your phone or expect extended RAM to help out on the app’s performance, that’s not what it’s for. It is always recommended to clear any background apps to prioritize a mobile game’s performance.