- This video from 2013 has 2.5 million views,
and yet it's straight up wrong.
Can you imagine how many gamers,
for all these years,
we convinced RAM speed didn't matter?
We now know it does matter.
But here's a question for you:
when did RAM speed start to matter?
Were we wrong before?
Or did something change
since baby faced Linus was still using Windows 7?
And if so, what?
I can tell you nothing changes about these segues
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- We've got a few theories
about why the impact of RAM speed
is different for gaming today,
than it was nine years ago.
And while we all agree
that each of them is probably true,
we don't know which is the most influential.
Since I'm already here,
let's start with my theory, which is this:
the benchmarks themselves were flawed,
and so our results were also flawed.
Looking at the old video,
where we claimed RAM speed didn't matter,
we ran a GTX 660Ti
at 1080p max settings with anti-aliasing enabled.
We are GPU-bound out the wazoo,
which isn't going to tell us much
about how the RAM is behaving.
I need to redo these tests with reasonable settings,
so I pulled those old parts out from the archives
and built a similar enough system
to rerun Metro: Last Light.
The numbers won't quite line up
since we don't have our 660Ti anymore,
but we can see how it does
with this factory overclocked 660.
At the original benchmark settings,
we're once again looking at very little difference
between the RAM speeds.
Technically our 2666 kit runs over 5% faster
in minimum frame rates,
but that translates into
less than a whole frame per second in the real world.
So...
yeah.
If we turn off anti-aliasing,
we're still seeing a similar result,
despite the lesser load on the GPU.
And so when we switch over
to more modest in game settings
that we see almost no difference across the board.
What?
Okay, then.
I expected that the higher our frame rates,
the more RAM speed would matter.
I guess the result makes some sense,
seeing as the higher the settings,
the more data needs to pass
through the CPU to the GPU.
Maybe if I run a notoriously CPU-bound title
at eSports settings,
we'll get more of an impact on RAM speed?
Kinda.
Minimum frame rates creep up
as we go up in RAM speed,
but it's not by a lot,
and average FPS doesn't change by much.
Cinebench R15 also doesn't show
much of a difference in CPU rendering.
Although, we depart from our original review here
by mostly even jumps,
as we go up the stack in OpenGL.
Did I just accidentally
prove our old video right?
Well, not so fast.
Let's hear Jake's theory.
- Games have gotten a lot bigger over the last nine years.
And because of that, a ton of data has to go
to the GPU very quickly.
Top that off with more intense physics,
calculations, and heavier operating systems
with more going on in the background,
and you've got yourself a RAM bottleneck.
So my theory, or at least part of it,
is that RAM speed just
didn't matter as much back then,
and what changed is actually the games.
- Which is a good point.
We saw this in reverse
when we dropped the settings down in Metro,
and got less disparity between our RAM kits.
Cinebench OpenGL gave us another clue,
which is in its CPU utilization.
It seems like three, to four threads
are in use at any given time.
So larger, more modern games,
with bigger assets that use more threads,
should show a greater disparity
between our RAM kits.
So let's test Jake's theory.
The most modern title we have,
that I can easily run on Windows 7
is Shadow of the Tomb Raider,
which is both pretty large,
and uses multiple threads.
And, well, slow RAM hurts a bit at 1080p ultra,
but there's no tangible difference
going from 1600 to 2666,
despite the immense cost difference
when it was new.
Cutting the detail level to low,
narrows the gap even further,
which tracks with what we saw in Metro.
Bigger assets need faster RAM,
or a bigger bag.
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you can fit so many assets in there.
So Jake's onto something.
Assets are a factor,
but now we had to ask:
is that all there is?
Let's hear Linus's thoughts.
- Since we made that video,
GPUs have gotten ridiculously powerful.
Even just three years later,
we went from a GTX 660
with two gigs of RAM and an anemic processor,
to the 1060, a mid-range GPU
that had up to six gigabytes of VRAM,
not to mention that it was much more powerful.
So my theory is that as GPUs have gotten more,
and more powerful, they've also become more,
and more demanding on the rest of your system.
Whether we're talking about PCI express slot bandwidth,
or, you got it, system memory bandwidth.
- This is probably the most obvious difference
between our old test setup and today's.
So let's test that.
I slotted an RTX 2080 Ti into the old bench,
in place of the GTX 660,
and oh boy does it ever make a difference.
Not just that it's so much faster than the 660,
but we finally see scaling between our memory speeds.
The difference in Metro is at minimum,
about 5% going from 1600 to 2666,
and the absolute chasm
between 800 and 1600, is staggering.
Shadow of the Tomb Raider,
similarly slams the slow memory,
and gives the fast stuff
a roughly 10 to 12% advantage
over the typical frequency, back in the day.
CS:GO, despite being notoriously CPU-bound,
is ironically less sensitive here.
Perhaps due to the settings, or those old assets,
but the biggest difference being in average frame rate.
So, Linus was onto something here.
But there's a twist.
Cinebench, again, doesn't seem to care,
until we boot up the OpenGL test
where we get similar scaling to the GTX 660.
That test must be CPU limited,
since we've removed all the other variables.
Which is where Alex's theory comes into play.
- Since 2013 CPUs have gotten bonkers fast.
We've gone from dual cores being fine,
and quad cores being high end,
and they couldn't even break four gigahertz.
Now quad cores are low end,
and we're easily pushing past five gigahertz
on eight core processors, it's crazy.
Plus, CPUs have gotten way faster in terms of IPC,
and they have way bigger caches.
Keeping that many cores fed
means you need faster RAM.
So, my theory is that in 2013,
we simply didn't have enough cores,
and general CPU speed,
for RAM speed to really make a difference.
- Another good point, and illustrate it,
I've taken our modern Core i9-12900K
and tweaked its DDR5 to be as slow as possible.
Yes, that says DDR5-1600.
It benchmarks close to,
but still a little bit faster
than the DDR3-1600 on our old bench.
But, with about 2.5 times the latency.
It's as close to apples to apples as we'll get,
and we'll have the benches parts linked down below.
With the RTX 2080 Ti,
the difference RAM speed makes
is material in Metro,
but it's not as major as you might think,
at less than 10% going from DDR3 to DDR5.
And that carries over to CS:GO, too.
And again, there's virtually no difference
in Cinebench, whatsoever.
We need something more modern
to really see the difference here.
So I fired up F1 2021 and Far Cry 6
with and without HD textures.
And, yeah, the difference
between 1600 and 6000 is incredible,
especially in Far Cry 6,
where we're looking at upwards of 50%.
But something magical happens when we look at the numbers
for 4800 megatransfers per second RAM, versus 6000.
Look at that.
Does it remind you of something?
Yeah, it's more or less in that zero to 5% range
just like our old bench tests.
This time, the 2080 Ti is the bottleneck.
There's always something isn't there?
For the sake of completeness,
when we pair the GTX 660 with the modern system,
it's predictively GPU-bound in every scenario,
except CS:GO, where the extra RAM speed did help
pretty significantly in both minimum
and average frame rates.
With all the testing done,
it's time to answer the question:
what changed?
Our old testing methodology
didn't actually end up playing a major role.
In fact, it turns out that,
anti-aliasing aside,
running games at higher quality is a good benchmark
for testing RAM speed.
Software, on the other hand,
did in fact change things,
sometimes dramatically.
But, only to a point.
If your CPU and GPU
are being properly fed, and fully utilized,
it becomes a question of how fast that hardware is,
rather than how fast the RAM is.
And, if they aren't being fully utilized,
then faster RAM will nudge them
closer to peak performance.
That means that faster memory today
may, or may not significantly improve performance,
depending on the application and your hardware.
But, later on down the road,
when you upgrade your GPU,
you'll be bottlenecked far less
if you have faster RAM.
In other words, our old video wasn't technically wrong.
But there's far more to the story
than we understood back then.
And almost certainly more that we didn't uncover today.
What we did learn today,
was that compared to CPUs,
GPUs are more sensitive to changes in RAM speed,
or at least the RTX 2080 Ti is more sensitive to RAM speed
than our 12900K is.
Our test suite was limited,
so Radeon or Ryzen may scale differently.
The big takeaway, is this:
it's that combination,
of software complexity, more available bandwidth
and more data hungry GPU cores,
that makes memory speed matter.
And it does matter.
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- Thanks for watching guys.
Instead of throwing you to that old video,
how about checking out our much more recent video,
exploring whether eight gigs of RAM is still enough in 2022?
The answer might surprise you.