DDR3 RAM Gaming AnalysisA look into the relationship between high end gaming and RAM
Page 1 / 6 09/05/09
INTRODUCTION
We have seen an exponential increase in the technological advancement of PC gaming over the last decade. Ever since the release of Half Life in 1998, video game developers have made sure that for every piece of high end computer hardware , there is a game that will push it to its limits. Quake 3 Arena, Doom 3, Far Cry, F.E.A.R and Crysis are some names that come to mind in this regard.
It is common knowledge that GPU and CPU play a heavy role when it comes to gaming performance. Depending on the resolution and image quality of a game, the choice of GPU and CPU will influence your gaming experiencing. Over the years, we have seen plenty of reviews and analysis on various hardware sites including this one, where various GPUs and CPUs are put to the test by running modern gaming benchmarks. But how often do we see a RAM analysis ? I have seen some but there are few and far between. One of the reasons for this is the fact that the effect of RAM speeds and timings on gaming is not as pronounced as that of CPU and GPU. Most of the times the games could use a lot more CPU and GPU horsepower before the hunger for more RAM kicks in. But what if we try to maximize the GPU and CPU horsepower to such an extent that RAM starts to play a heavy part? Or what if there is some gaming titles out there that are genuinely RAM sensitive, regardless of the GPU and CPU ?
In today's analysis, we will try to answer some of these questions. This mini article is by no means a full blown, detailed RAM analysis since that would require testing a lot more benchmarks, at a lot more RAM / GPU / CPU configuration combinations. However, it does give you a general idea of how RAM affects high end gaming.
TEST SYSTEM
The following system was used for this article
EVGA X58 3 X SLI motherboard
I7 920 D0 @ 4.25 GHZ
4 GB Patriot Viper DDR3 1600 MHZ RAM @ various settings
(3) X EVGA GTX 285 3-SLI (Forceware 190.38)
Gateway 30" XHD
Vista X64 Ultimate
BENCHMARKS USED
We used eight games for this test:
Cryostasis Tech Demo
Crysis
Fall Out 3
Far Cry 2
H.A.W.X Demo
Lost Planet Demo
Race Driver : GRID
World in Conflict Demo
Beside Fall Out 3 and Race Driver GRID, all the games come with a built in benchmarking demo. The built in demos were used for this analysis. Some of the demos report both average and minimum frame rates, while some only report minimum. This will be reflected in the graphs for each game. Also, when using FRAPS, the minimum frame rates reported are unreliable since it is not possible to play a scene 100 % the same way each time. This is why I only reported the average FPS for titles tested with FRAPS.
I used two resolutions, and three different RAM configurations for the tests. Each test was run at 2560 X 1600 and 1920 X 1200. The Ram Configurations were 1620 8-8-8-25 1T, 1214 8-8-8-25 1T, and 1214 11-11-11-25 1T. The QPI was kept constant at 203 while the RAM divider was changed to get the two frequencies.
Let us take a look at the results...next page please.
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