How much does memory speed impact gaming?

[ArcherTechTips]

I have 2x8gb of 2133 ram (duel channel), and i was wondering of my ram could be bottlenecking my gpu.

[typographie]

RAM does not really "bottleneck" a GPU. If you have issues with performance in a game, there is a long list of much more likely reasons than your RAM simply being too slow.

[bakidota]

it depends on the generation of your cpu, on amd ryzen platform higher clocks can make huge imapct on frames. on intel haswell generation the difference is very marginal within 1 fps, on skylake i feel its the same maybe 2-3 fps tops

[stefanDB]

dual channel DDR4 is pretty fast anyway, It is probably not worth it to upgrade because the difference will be small

[ARikozuM]

If the CPU is a major factor (KSP, Witcher, BF, Arma), RAM speed will have a positive affect.

[Light-Yagami]

If running intel, anything up from 2666mhz makes no difference. But running Ryzen yields considerable performance improvement when using higher clocked RAM due to the nature of how CPU die is put together and how two groups of CPU cores are connected. I think that when Ryzen optimizes their chips for higher clocked RAM, performance in gaming should improve. We're talking 3200mhz and higher

 

[ArcherTechTips]

5 minutes ago, ARikozuM said:

If the CPU is a major factor (KSP, Witcher, BF, Arma), RAM speed will have a positive affect.

i have a 6700k (which was a little overkill because the usage never goes above 50%), so i probably will be fine. Thanks though

[Noirgheos]

15 minutes ago, bakidota said:

it depends on the generation of your cpu, on amd ryzen platform higher clocks can make huge imapct on frames. on intel haswell generation the difference is very marginal within 1 fps, on skylake i feel its the same maybe 2-3 fps tops

Skylake? Kabylake? DigitalFoundry has results that show more than a 10FPS difference between RAM speeds.

[ARikozuM]

Just now, ArcherTechTips said:

i have a 6700k (which was a little overkill because the usage never goes above 50%), so i probably will be fine. Thanks though

50% CPU usage can be misleading on HT processors. If 4 logical cores are pegged at 100%, but the others are doing nothing, your CPU usage will show as 50%.

[Tech Wizard]

Higher memory speeds does affect gaming. Some games love high memory speeds, while other games only gets minor improvements. See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Er_Fuz54U0Y&t=39s

 and

https://youtu.be/qksXthUcbiQ?t=2m29s