RAM speed has only a very small effect on gaming performance?

Someone said that having really fast memory has only an extremely small effect on PC gaming performance?

I’ve seen benchmarks with average vs fast memory and there is only a 1-3 fps difference at best.

Two things to note here…

1). Modern games at high resolutions see a far greater FPS effect from the power of the GPU than the CPU
2). If you have an Intel chip, then RAM speed will have little effect (the only chips that see a sizable impact are in the Ryzen family).

It all depends where your bottleneck is. But in most cases, if RAM speed is the issue, then you’ve either got a super-duper system or your GPU has run out of VRAM.

RAM speed is almost useless to bother considering even measuring the speed of, because of how little effect it has on performance, if not 0%.

I have played GTA IV, a notoriously CPU and memory intensive game, on RD-RAM, which is notoriously slow and inefficient.

The performance did not change at all compared to DDR2 and even DDR3 memory. The amount available to the game is what directly effected object/texture loading time and consistency, as well as if the system had to halt to wait on information to be replaced in RAM or virtual memory.

Though I would assume running brand new games on anything older than 266Mhz DDR2 memory would definitely show a difference.

You have probably not seen how the speed affects the Ryzen chips then (benchmarks show they do have a noticeable impact and that is why numerous people with such systems saw a performance boost when a new BIOS update fixed various issues with memory).

One major reason for that is that it affects the speed in which information flows through what’s known as the infinity fabric (ie. the speed at which the cores talk to each other).

You may not see much difference yourself because your system is so old (so newer hardware and technology cannot be utilized well).

The thing with RAM, is it’s not permanent storage memory - it’s volatile. It’s called upon when needed, and it’s never permanent. RAM access is, by definition, random. I liken RAM as to the physical storage space on-top of a table. You can add things, remove things, and change things around on it. The speed of which you place things on and off of that table is virtually irrelevant. There are other, much more important factors at play that define the general speed of your system. Like someone has said, it depends on where the bottleneck is and RAM is highly unlikely to be it.

This is exactly why I love the Blender community, discussions and debates can be had over these kind of things. :slight_smile:

There is not a significant difference in my testing because;
The performance range between RD-RAM - DDR2 is not wide.
The notable differences begin in the DDR3 era, and will only have noticeable differences in newer software that are well optimized, which is becoming a common thing these days, thankfully.

Also, GTA IV has a data width if 32-Bits regardless of your OS, as the game is indeed old, and takes advantage of more RAM through what is essentially an in-house mod. Similar to mods that have been made for Windows XP and 2000 to allow them to address and read over 3GB of RAM, but isn’t very efficient and does not match the performance benefits of actual 64-bit data abilities, as 4GB+ of RAM can be properly addressed and taken advantage of.

DDR4 is a huge jump and why I didn’t include it in the barely noticeable category is because of just how much of a difference it made compared to older RAM types.

I have tested mostly, the best per RAM generation/chipset,

RD-RAM had a Pentium 4 Willamette, 1.60Ghz.
DDR1-133Mhz had a Pentium 4 Northwood 2.80Ghz CPU,
DDR2-800Mhz had a Core 2 Quad Q6700 2.40Ghz
DDR3, I have tried both an AMD FX-8320 and Core i7 950, which are both admittedly not the best.
As for DDR4, Pentium G4400 and an AMD Ryzen 1700, which was incredibly fast.

I imagine DDR4 being breathtaking in the APU market, and now that I think about it, I really want to have a go at DDR4 with an APU, it’s just annoying that most APUs are not flexible and you can not manually address a certain amount of your RAM for VRAM.