In total we spent a few weeks testing 41 games and we'll take a look at the side-by-side comparison across all those games in a second. But if we look at an average graph, calculated using the geomean, we see that on average DDR5 memory offered just a 3% boost at 1080p, 2% at 1440p and then one percent at 4K. Depending on the games you play, DDR5 memory can offer little to no performance gain, and this will be true for most titles. The best performing examples show up to a 20% boost which is significant, and here we're comparing premium DDR4-3600 memory to premium DDR5-6000, with the DDR5 kit coming in at a ~70% price premium. Starting with Assassin's Creed Valhalla, we see a 13% to 15% performance improvement with newer DDR5 memory, taking the average frame rate from 121 fps at 1080p, to 137 fps. But more impressive than that was the 17% performance boost seen at 1440p when looking at the 1% lows with a 12% boost to the average frame rate. As we just saw, DDR5 offers a 3% performance boost overall, but here we can see that gains were as large as 20% in games such as Far Cry 6 and Bright Memory. Other games to show strong gains include Watch Dogs Legion, Assassin's Creed Valhalla, The Riftbreaker, and Fortnite, to name a few. It also depends on how you see your investment in RAM too. Paying a premium for DDR5 in 2021 or early 2022 means you can use that RAM when building a new system in 2026 (where you’d have to toss the DDR4). But typically it’s better just to upgrade to a new memory standard a few years after it drops, when the RAM will be larger, faster and cheaper. Will next-gen CPUs be faster with DDR4 or DDR5?

What that tells us: The answer to the question "Which is better, DDR5 or DDR4?" really comes down to which tests you include (or don't include). But whatever your selector set is, the results remain close, at least with today's modules. Also, chances are 12th-gen Core series owners won't feel the need to upgrade until 14th-gen hits at the absolute earliest, and at that point you'd need a new motherboard anyway. Finally, we take a look at War Thunder and here we're seeing pretty impressive performance gains at 1080p, though how useful a 24% performance boost is when you're already over 200 fps is hard to argue about. Still, even at 4K we're looking at up to a 9% performance boost. Micron builds DDR5 server memory with power management integrated circuits (PMICs) on the module, meaning that customers are not paying for power management of the entire system. This design can initially mean a lower overall cost to power DDR5 servers compared to DDR4 servers when some system slots are left open. Micron server memory is high quality and typically less expensive than OEM server memory.

Whether you’re pushing the limits in your gaming with the most extreme settings, live streaming at 4K+ or pushing large animations and 3D rendering, Kingston FURY Beast DDR5 memory is the level-up needed, while seamlessly bridging style and unleashing performance. There were also games that ran slower with DDR5, by a 5% margin or greater, such as Age of Empires, Hitman 2, The Division 2, Valorant and Death Stranding. Counter Strike Global Offensive is a heavily CPU limited game, and here we see feeding the processor more bandwidth doesn't help improve performance at 1080p and 1440p, though we're only talking about a minor single-digit difference. But it appears as though lower latency memory is more important for this title. But DDR5 supply is expected to improve next year, and so will pricing, so we wanted to take a more in-depth look at what DDR5 has to offer gamers when using an Alder Lake CPU, and this will help us determine at which point you should bother with the new memory technology.

DDR5 does indeed include ECC (or error correction control) that can detect multi-bit errors and correct single-bit errors. It is, however, not what you’re expecting if your workload already requires the technology.A game that doesn't benefit from the use of DDR5 memory is Battlefield 2042. Although this data is based on our easier to execute bot match, the 128 player modes don't see any improvement with the higher bandwidth DDR5 memory either. So this one is a bust for the ultra expensive DDR5 memory. Here we see that the higher bandwidth DDR5 memory has boosted performance at 1080p by 15% and the same is also seen at 1440p when looking at the 1% lows. Even at 4K we're seeing a small 6% boost to 1% lows with the newer memory. Clearly DDR5 isn't worth it right now, but we already knew that. Pricing aside, DDR5 has little to offer over DDR4 in today's games with an Alder Lake processor for the most part. That being the case, budget conscious shoppers should only consider DDR5 at a 10%, or maybe a 20% price premium at most, when going for a flagship part like the Core i9-12900K. For a little while at least, DDR5 is best left to early adopters who are prepared for any unexpected behaviors and see it as the price you pay for playing with the latest tech.

No, DDR5 server memory and DDR4 motherboards are incompatible. DDR5 will only fit in DDR5 server motherboards for all CPUs (central processing units) released into the market after October 2022. DDR5 is designed for data-intensive workloads like generative AI, machine learning, deep learning and other workloads running complex algorithms. How is DDR5 frequency categorized, in megahertz or megatransfers per second? Consider the current transition from PCIe 3.0 to PCIe 4.0. A lot of early PCIe 4.0 components require massive heatsinks and fans on the motherboards to keep things cool. DDR5 isn't likely to have the same issues, of course, but it goes to show that new technology transitions usually have a few issues at the start. In contrast, the 7-Zip Beta compression/decompression benchmark shows tremendous gains in file-compression performance with the DDR5 kit. (See the 7-Zip results on their own tab.) So, in addition to the built-in 7-Zip benchmark, we added an actual 7.6GB file-compression time (a second 7-Zip result) to our timed benchmarks. Testing PUGB shows a small improvement to the 1% lows with DDR5, about 5 - 7% so nothing to write home about. Meanwhile, the average frame rate remained much the same, so either memory technology will allow you to squeeze the most out of an Alder Lake CPU in this game. Moreover, of the 41 games tested, 26 of them saw 4% or less variation in performance, which is basically nothing and gameplay is identical. So for over 60% of the games tested performance was a match. It's also worth noting that for 75% of the games tested, DDR5-6000 memory failed to offer over a 5% improvement.The UL Procyon benchmark, which runs a consistent, repeatable workload on a licensed install of Adobe Premiere Pro, shows that more bandwidth can help matters, with DDR5-4800 taking the win there. The results of this test still indicate some gains for reduced latency when moving from CAS 22 to CAS 14 at DDR4-3200, however.

As expected, the margins close up at 4K where the GPU becomes the key limiting factor, but even so I was surprised to see a 9% boost to the 1% low and a 13% uplift for the average frame rate. So DDR5 is offering a clear performance advantage in Assassin's Creed Valhalla.Micron DDR5 server DRAM nearly doubles the performance of DDR4. Unlike DDR4, DDR5 is optimized to increase server and workstation performance by 85% or more. First introduced in 2014, DDR4 can no longer keep up with the demands of the data center. With more instances of actively running virtual machines on a single platform, DDR5 technology relieves the bandwidth-per-core memory crunch and increases the performance and responsiveness of virtualized applications. Call of Duty Vanguard is another game where we find a negligible difference between the two memory types, even at 1080p. So it would seem this game isn't limited by memory bandwidth. You could argue that a 20% premium is worth it given we're already seeing examples of 20% gains in games. But you're better off saving the money for a future upgrade because the DDR5 available right now is going to be terrible when compared to DDR5 memory in a year or two. We saw the same thing happen with DDR4, and DDR3 before it. For now, we have this less demanding part of the game and here DDR5 offers very little over DDR4, though I suspect this will also be true for more demanding scenes as well. Initial DDR5 memory module prices are expected to be higher than those for DDR4 (50% more) while the new technology ramps into full production. Over time, the cost is expected to come down, but each DDR5 module includes a small power management integrated circuit, which was moved from a single large circuit on the motherboard. This move, along with the component voltage drop from 1.2V to 1.1V, improves power management and could lower overall system costs over time. In addition, because DDR5 provides an estimated 85% performance improvement, upgrading may effectively reduce overall TCO. When will DDR5-enabled server products be sold?