DDR5 vs DDR4: A new report has revealed that games make better utilization of the DDR5 RAM these days, allowing more performance while gaming.
About two and a half years ago, we shared a report which showed how there was hardly any difference (just 3%) in gaming performance between DDR4 and DDR5 RAM. Those tests were done by TechSpot’s Steven Walton – best known for his Hardware Unboxed YouTube channel.
During that time, getting DDR5 RAM was hard. It was expensive and only Intel’s Alder Lake CPUs supported it optionally.
Later, AMD released Ryzen 7000 series with DDR5 RAM only support. This was different from Intel, whose CPUs support both DDR4 and DDR5 until now.
AMD’s move was enough to help DDR5 prices reduce significantly over the course of time. Now DDR5 RAM is far cheaper to get and could become a standard – if not already one.
Now, as we move towards more and more people preferring DDR5 RAM for gaming, it’s important to know the difference in its performance when compared to DDR4 in modern games. Looks like we have a fair idea now.
16% To 22% Faster Depending On CPU
TechSpot’s Steven Walton again benchmarked DDR5 vs DDR4 RAM in games. This time with more modern games and more CPUs.
DDR4’s comparison this time however was with a faster DDR5 RAM – DDR5-7200MHz for Raptor Lake and DDR5-6400 for Alder Lake CPUs. The number of games tested too are lesser but it gives us some idea.
Those who don’t like reading and would rather watch the video instead can do so via his YouTube video about the same.
The benchmarks have revealed something really important. DDR5 RAM is far faster than DDR4 in newer games than it was two and a half years ago.
Both Intel Core i9-14900K and Intel Core i5-14600K saw an average performance improvements of 16%.
The Alder Lake CPUs saw even bigger performance improvements. With Intel Core i9-12900K seeing an average increase of massive 22% and Intel Core i5-12600K seeing an 20% increase in performance.
The game which saw the biggest performance improvements in FPS was Baldur’s Gate 3. Which saw it’s performance increase by a big 35% on the i5-12600K CPU.
The least performance improvement was seen in Counter-Strike 2. Which had just 2% increase in performance on both Intel Core i9-14900K and Intel Core i5-14600K.
Results Explained
There are two things to understand here. One is, games are making a better use of faster RAM now. Which is great. This means that the performance difference between DDR5 and DDR4 RAM is going to increase further as more and more games release.
The second important thing to see here is that Steve mentions how Alder Lake CPUs get more performance improvements than Raptor Lake. The reason he says is simple, Raptor Lake CPUs come with more cache.
For example, Intel Core i9-14900K has 36MB cache, whereas i9-12900K has 30MB cache. Similarly, Intel Core i5-14600K comes with 24MB cache, whereas i5-12600K comes with 20MB cache. In both the cases, the difference of cache is around 18%.
What happens here is that due to the larger cache size, the CPU needs to go to the RAM lesser amount of times. This means lesser need for faster RAM. So smaller cache size means Alder Lake requires more RAM hits, allowing it to benefit more from the faster RAM speeds.
Conclusion
While DDR5 RAM is still more expensive than DDR4 RAM, going forward that price difference will decrease further. Whereas, more and more games will better utilize the faster DDR5 RAM, increasing the difference between DDR5 and DDR4 in performance.
So the current suggestion will be to buy DDR5 RAM sticks instead of DDR4 ones. Provided that one can afford them, that is.
Either way, Intel Arrow Lake Core Ultra 200 series CPUs are going to support only DDR5 RAM. Not to mention, AMD Ryzen 7000 CPUs support only DDR5 RAM since launch and even the recently announced AMD Ryzen 9000 supports only DDR5 RAM.
So going forward, DDR5 RAM is the best way to go. After all, we are now seeing a confirmed performance benefit from it.
