Problems with ddr4 memories affect the performance of ryzen

AMD Ryzen is already on the street and is almost everything we expected from it, except for its performance in games that is still somewhat below Intel's proposals with its i7 Skylake and Kaby Lake. This gaming performance could have an explanation in DDR4 RAM.

DDR4 memory speed has a strong impact on Ryzen

According to the Eteknix note, the speed of DDR4 memory has a strong impact on the overall performance of Ryzen processors, that includes video games.

The problem that is emerging with some assemblers such as MSI, Gigabyte, ASRock or Asus, is that their motherboards have problems in taking DDR4 memories at maximum speed. Currently we find DDR4 memories that are set at a speed between 1866 and 2400MHz, well below the 3200 or 3400MHz speed reached by this type of DDR4 memory.

In the following graph you can see the performance of the Ryzen processor with DDR4 memories at different speeds, from 2133MHz to 3466MHz. The difference in Geekbench in both single-threaded and multi-threaded is 10% more performance.

Geekbench performance at different speeds

In video games the exact same thing happens, in this case the The Witcher 3 was used to check what was that difference in performance.

Up to 15% performance gain with @ 3200MHz memories

With DDR4 memory set at 2133MHz and a GTX 1080 at the highest quality, the game reaches 92.5 FPS, while with memory running at 3200MHz it reaches 107.4 FPS, a gain that would be around 15% more performance.

It is expected that the different assemblers of motherboards are publishing new updates to their BIOS that will solve the problems with DDR4 RAM in a short time. We will keep you informed.