So to price such a comparison, I used two of (what I) consider the best specs for DDR4 and DDR5, DDR4-3600 C14 and DDR5-6000 C36. These are not the fastest for either type, but they are both plenty fast with a very high probability of working on any AMD or Intel platform, and within spitting distance of the fastest in terms of performance without price spiking way up into the 300+ range (for both types).
Guess what? They cost the same.
DDR4-3600 C14 is not what people are comparing DDR5 to. They're comparing it against more reasonably priced kits with common timings that cost $100+ less. Paying a big premium for either DDR5 or a kit of DDR4 with abnormally high frequencies or tight timings is not worthwhile, unless perhaps someone is using it specifically for a workload that can benefit from it, and doesn't have any other components that the money could be better spent on.
In the vast majority of real-world applications and games, a $250 kit of RAM will perform nearly indistinguishable from a $100 kit of RAM of the same capacity. Even in CPU-limited scenarios, the performance difference is generally going to be within a few percent, and in graphics-limited gaming scenarios, they will perform virtually identical. Unless the system is already using near-top-of-the-line components, that money would almost certainly be better put toward something like a higher-end CPU or GPU.
It took me about 10 seconds to find this. That's 14FPS or about 7% loss on cheap DDR4-4000 C19 vs DDR5-6000.
Cheap DDR4-4000 is just that, cheap hot garbage. A lot of Hynix DDR4-3200 kits can be OC to 4000 if you loosen up the timing. Cheap DDR4-4000 is just that - slower ram with crap timings.
And good luck getting two 16GB sticks of DDR4-4000 C15 to work, there's a reason the heavily OC DDR4 is not sold in 32GB kits.
Lest we fail to mention, if you go with extremely high speed DDR4 you are stuck at 16GB or lower your speeds significantly. Not the case with DDR5.
The reason I chose to compare DDR4-3600 C14-15-15-35 is because it is some of the best RAM you can get for DDR4 that will work on almost any platform. This chart shows that too.
That could potentially be relevant for someone buying a 3080 Ti just to run that one racing game at 1080p with medium settings. : P
I tracked down that review, and in another chart they show performance with the settings turned up, still at 1080p, where there is only a 1.5% difference between those two underlined RAM kits. At resolutions above 1080p, there would likely be no measurable difference even with a 3080 Ti.
And of course, the post you were responding to was comparing DDR4-4000 C18 against the DDR5-6000 C36 kit you suggested, whereas the underlined results in that chart are comparing DDR4-4000 C19 against DDR5-6000 C30. So, looser timings on the DDR4, and much tighter timings on the DDR5. Right now, a 32GB kit of DDR5 with those timings will set you back $350, while a 32GB kit of DDR4-4000 C18 (with faster timings) can be had for $120.
And you might also notice that a kit of DDR4-3600 C17 managed to perform within 3% of that $350 DDR5 kit in the chart you posted. I would not be surprised if a $140 kit of DDR4-3600 C16 managed to perform the same or better than DDR5-6000 C36 in that game. The 35% slower absolute latency of the DDR5 kit is going to often counter its higher transfer rate, at least in games.
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