As Alder Lake supports DDR5 memory, friends who plan to buy a new computer or upgrade their equipment will definitely wonder if they need to spend more money to upgrade to DDR5? Or is DDR4 enough? Of course, those who don’t have a budget limit will just go for the top. There is nothing to consider, but if so, DDR5 is not very cheap at this stage, so whether it is worth the investment is very important. For this reason, foreign media have actually measured DDR5 vs DDR4 software benchmarks and games, which should be able to give you a good reference. I will summarize them below.
Is there a big performance difference between DDR5 and DDR4? The actual test below will tell you
A few days ago, foreign media Anandtech published an Intel i3-12300 evaluation report, which included the measured performance gap between DDR5 vs DDR4. Although most people would prefer to see the test with the i9-12900K and i7-12700K flagship processors, most people who have budget considerations will choose mid-to-low-end processors, which is more in line with the actual situation. The following are the memory settings during testing, all in compliance with JEDEC standards:
- DDR4-3200 CL22
- DDR5-4800(B) CL40
The first is the software benchmarking section. Anandtech tested many models, and here I will sort out the ones that have some differences. The picture below is AppTimer: GIMP 2.10.18. DDR4 is relatively fast, but DDR5 takes one second longer to complete, which is quite surprising:
The same goes for NAMD ApoA1 Simulation, DDR4 is a little faster:
However, CineBench R24 multi-thread test mode DDR5’s score of 8,598 is even higher than DDR4’s score of 7,936:
Handbrake 1.3.2 is the same, DDR5 got 196, which is higher than DDR4’s 187:
WinRAR 5.90 has the most obvious gap among them all. DDR5 is about 21% faster than DDR4. This is not surprising. After all, WinRAR pays great attention to memory bandwidth:
Geekbench 5 multi-thread test is the same as CineBench R24, DDR5 wins and the gap is not small:
Next comes the game. The game is not as obvious as the above software test. DDR5 is only 3~7 FPS faster than DDR4 on average, and the difference is basically not felt when playing.
In the 4K quality setting of “Civilization VI”, DDR5 only has about 3.6 FPS more than DDR4 on average, which is very little:
The gap in “Borderland 3” is relatively large. The average FPS of 4K Vlow setting DDR5 is 10.4 faster:
Far Cry 5’s 1080p Ultra settings had the highest average DDR5 FPS of any gaming test, with a difference of 15 FPS. However, the higher the image quality setting, the smaller the gap, which is different from other games:
So overall, at the current price of DDR5, it is not worth it, because you can only feel the difference in a few software (such as WinRAR), while others are fine, especially games, so people who don’t have a big budget are advised to choose DDR4. It would be better to wait until DDR5 is almost reduced before switching.
Source: KOCPC Chinese