Would you have believed that you could increase your frame rates by up to 10% in Ashes simply by using four ranks of memory? Or that you could reduce file compression time by up to 13%? Isn’t that performance gain similar to upgrading to the next level of graphics card or CPU? Given that 8GB per-rank capacity fills the enthusiast market, isn’t this a good enough reason for us to recommend 32GB to gamers, even to those who will never need more than half of its total capacity?
There is something else important to consider though, and that is that these examples are outliers, not the norm. Sure, moving up to 32GB might provide notable performance gains in some rare examples, but in the vast majority of games, the performance differences will tend to range from unnoticeable to nonexistant. That's different from the performance gains from moving up to a higher-end graphics card, where performance can be improved in practically all modern games to a noticeable degree.
And even these outlier examples are of questionable relevance. Ashes of the Singularity might make for a good multi-threaded CPU performance benchmark, but it was never really among the most popular games, and those kinds of performance gains likely won't translate to many titles that people are actually playing in significant numbers. And how much does a 10% performance difference even matter in an RTS game like this when the game is running at 100+ fps with all memory configurations at those settings? That goes even more so for F1 2017, where we are looking at around a 3% difference for framerates in excess of 200fps, something that would be completely imperceptible.
And these outliers were only seen with the settings turned down somewhat at 1080p, which is probably not a very common scenario for most of those running an RTX 2070 like the test system appears to be using (I had to search for the specifications in another review, which is not exactly ideal). With a more mid-range graphics card, or this card running at max graphics settings or a higher resolution, these already barely-significant performance differences become much less significant. Most games tend to have their performance limited by the GPU more than anything, so the performance gains from a more expensive memory configuration will tend to be quite minimal. If someone has an extra $75 or $100 to spend on a gaming system, and is deciding between 32GB of RAM or a faster graphics card, the faster graphics card will likely be the better option for the vast majority of games released within the next few years. The additional RAM may provide additional benefit eventually, but for now the benefits of 32GB for gaming and most other tasks will be limited.
Nice article though! It helped give a better idea of just how much these differences in memory speed, timing and rank can potentially affect performance on 3rd-gen Ryzen. It was interesting to see just how much dual-rank memory can potentially affect performance in certain applications. Getting 2x16GB or 4x8GB of mid-range RAM seems to be more beneficial to performance than getting just 2x8GB of faster, low-latency RAM that could end up costing more.
Moving from a typical single-rank 16GB kit of 3200 C16 memory (around US $75) to a much more expensive low-latency single-rank 16GB kit of 3600 C16 (close to $150) only improved performance by up to around 4% in those outlier examples (4% in Ashes, 4% in F1 and 2% in 7-Zip). If one were to instead use that money to go with a dual-rank 32GB kit of 3200 C16 (also around $150), that could net them over a 10% increase in performance over the single-rank 3200 kit in those outliers (10% in Ashes, 3% in F1 and 13% in 7-Zip). Plus, you get double the RAM, so if future games or other applications start showing notable performance benefits from having more than 16GB a few years down the line, you will already have that, and won't need to spend more on upgrading. This seems to make a 32GB kit of normal-latency RAM a better value than a 16GB kit of higher-clocked low-latency RAM. And sure, you could get a kit that features both 32GB and higher speeds with lower latency, but it's probably not worth paying too much more for unless you have an unlimited budget for a build. Again, these best-case examples are outliers, and the typical performance gains will likely tend to be much lower.
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