I currently have DDR4 3600mhz… I’ve been reading a lot about DDR5 like 6400mhz-10000mhz. I’m not really sure how ram scales in gaming and rendering and different things. Could someone expect 50% improvement in frames? Or maybe just like 25%?
More like around 5% Simply because the general latency will still be the same, as the timings for DDR5 also higher. Same thing when DDR4 came out there was no real benefit for gaming.
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Most game code runs within the cache RAM on the CPU. So faster RAM may improve 1% lows and it may improve texture load to the GPU. Although with Direct Storage that may happen directly from the NVMe drive.
Anyway, it’ll improve by a few percentage points.
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When DDR4 first came out, it was expensive and wasn’t better than top tier DDR3. Now it’s fantastic.
While I normally don’t recommend trying to wait for next gen out of fear of missing out on improvements, I’d advise waiting a year after DDR5 and PCIe 5.0 comes out. No sense burning money being a beta tester simply for the idea of technological improvement.
So if you are considering an upgrade, now is the best time. Except gpu’s of course.
You know I guess I could just do a test by running certain speeds and checking my frames but I still don’t know about architecture and things like that that come into play
Controllers for DDR5 could also be a bit naff for a while like gen 1 Ryzen was with DDR4.
Absolutely not, that’s way too much to expect from RAM alone. RAM impacts CPU performance so depending on how reliant on RAM speed new CPU architectures will be, some improvements might come but they won’t be due to RAM speed alone.
Also that “up to” 6400MHz sounds to me like the marketing was for DDR4 “up to 5000MHz” but realistically nobody can run that high of a frequency stable. So maybe we’ll see 4000-5000MHz as the norm for these kind of kits or even lower, but never 6400MHz.
Like X99 I’d say. Did you remember what a dumpster fire it was? Gonig past 2666MHz was difficult at best.
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Didn’t Zen 2 and Zen 3 react to higher clock speeds of ram?
Yes they did but it took a while to get there and many misstepps and bios revisions.
It does work better with higher speed ram, Zen 1 broke even around 3200MHz cost to benefit, Zen 2 around 3600 and Zen 3 can do 4000 reasonably.
But zen 1 struggled a lot and had a lot of compatibility issues, many could not get beyond 2133. Because the DDR4 controller was new and untested. Same problem with X99. It will be the same issue with DDR5. The controller will take revisions to get better and speeds to be of benefit.
But the DDR5 speeds will need to be truely colossal before they are a big advantage over end of life DDR4. At this stage the bugs have been worked out the speeds are stable and available to a whoever wants them. DDR5 will be slower comparably at the start. The literal number may be higher, eg: DDR4 3600 vs DDR5 5000, but it is likely that the DDR5 will be slower in actual use because generally the latency also doubles each generation. So the increased speed is only helping to get it even with the previous generation.
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This reminds me of another potential complication, AMD has an infinity fabric clock speed to contend with as well, and currently it and ram need to be matched otherwise latency suffers (how much I’m not clear on).
So unless AMD brings out some technical change to mitigate this in the next generation, I’m not expecting the early next-gen Ryzen stuff to improve the infinity fabric MHz enough to be able to match the High MHz DDR5 RAM that eventually comes out anyway.
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Yeah that a whole other kettle of fish. The easy button solution is to match them and really what the vast majority of people will benefit most from.
You can however mis match the Ram speed to Infinity Fabric and get even better performance but you need REALLY fast ram and to tune all the setting for into really work out which is a lot of restarts, bios changes, testing and over and over.
Not really relevant sorry…
It will be interesting to see how and what changes with nextZen (sorry) AMD CPUs and DDR5 AMD if they change the way they deal with it again.
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The higher performance tied to RAM for Zen cores is due more to the AMD Infinity Fabric. It does not only speed up the RAM, but also the cache and inter-core communication speed.
When the fabric speed and the RAM speed don’t match, it introduces a wait state at each transaction so that the data waits for one side or the other to pick it up.
For DDR5 AMD will either speed up Infinity Fabric or default it to 1/2 speed which is what they already do for any RAM faster than 3,600 MHz.
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