Is Higher RAM Speed Always Better For Gaming? Here’s What I Think

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Ali Rashid Khan

As Tech4Gamers’ Wiki Editor, I dissect gaming products, offering detailed perspectives from Best Motherboards to GPUs. When away from the keyboard, I’m into mechanical keyboards and global Scrabble competitions.

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I saw some users playing games like Valorant and Dota 2 with their 8000 MHz DDR5 RAM, and I was immediately like, who is going to tell them? The impact of higher RAM frequency or speed is not as simple as it seems. What separates the RAM upgrade from a total waste of money to a marginal FPS boost is your usage. At times, it might boost game performance significantly; sometimes, even the most expensive RAM upgrades might not contribute to performance.

Upgrading Or Overkill?

Whether you will benefit from a RAM upgrade depends entirely upon your usage and the rest of the PC components. Different games utilize RAM resources differently. Some benefit from RAM capacity, some from latency, and some from RAM Frequency or Speed. But to give you an overview, RAM speed does not matter as much as processor speed or GPU.

Where RAM Speed Matters The Most

Open-world games like Forza Horizon 5 render graphics in real-time. The graphics are rendered as you travel to a particular area. They have high CPU and VRAM usage, as the textures are transferred in and out of the GPU as needed. This is where RAM speed comes in. Faster RAMs can transfer the textures more quickly and boost FPS significantly. So, an increase in RAM speed will definitely add to performance here. Upgrading your VRAM, CPU, and GPU will also be helpful here.

Consider An Upgrade

Modern AAA games are improving daily. These games utilize RAM in a similar way to open-world games and are less CPU-intensive. However, they still need to access graphics data quickly. So, as long as you do not reach the GPU’s transfer speed limit, upgrading your RAM speed will increase the game’s performance, resulting in increased FPS. However, that difference will only be marginal and not near a GPU or CPU upgrade.

Running Into Redundancy

As I have been emphasizing, the effect of RAM speed entirely depends on the usage and hardware configuration. If your usual games are not memory intensive, e.g., RTS and MOBA games, upgrading your RAM speed will be an overkill. Some small-team FPS games like Valorant and CS2 also fall into this category.

Such games load the whole map at the start of the round and transfer the required textures to VRAM. For such games, RAM speed becomes irrelevant. While increasing RAM speed might marginally improve loading time at the start, it is not going to increase FPS. However, the RAM speed might slightly impact performance in these games if your GPU has low VRAM.

Ultimate Deduction

Below, I have shared benchmarks of two famous games tested with RAM sticks that have different latency and speed. These benchmarks are taken from JayzTwoCents’ YouTube Video. Let’s have a look at these benchmarks and see what they tell us:

Gaming Benchmarks

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Now, this is what I would recommend: if you’re upgrading nothing but your RAM, and that too just to increase the speed, I would highly recommend that you go over your game library and see if any game you play even benefits specifically from high RAM speed. That’s because, for Cyberpunk, the difference is simply nothing, and even for Shadow Of The Tomb Raider, we can only see an FPS difference at 1080p resolution.

Now, hear me out, if you’re building a gaming PC that can handle DDR5 kit running at a whopping 7200, is your CPU and GPU really that weak that you would have to play at 1080p? Wouldn’t you go towards 1440p or even 4K instead? Right? And if we look at those benchmarks, the difference again shrinks down to practically nothing.

Bottom Line

Ultimately, RAM speed is a big factor to consider when you’re buying. However, it shouldn’t be the only factor that you should watch out for. As we’ve seen in the benchmarks, RAM speed only matters to a certain limit, and after that, it’s all about latency, graphics card, and, of course, your CPU.

If you want to get a clear overview of what to consider when buying RAM, and how much each aspect matters, you can read our RAM buying guide.

Ali Rashid Khan

[Wiki Editor]

Ali Rashid Khan is an avid gamer, hardware enthusiast, photographer, and devoted litterateur with a period of experience spanning more than 14 years. Sporting a specialization with regards to the latest tech in flagship phones, gaming laptops, and top-of-the-line PCs, Ali is known for consistently presenting the most detailed objective perspective on all types of gaming products, ranging from the Best Motherboards, CPU Coolers, RAM kits, GPUs, and PSUs amongst numerous other peripherals. When he’s not busy writing, you’ll find Ali meddling with mechanical keyboards, indulging in vehicular racing, or professionally competing worldwide with fellow mind-sport athletes in Scrabble at an international level. Currently speaking, Ali has completed his A-Level GCEs with plans to go into either Allopathic Medicine or Business Studies, or who knows, perhaps a full-time dedicated technological journalist.
Get In Touch: alirashid@tech4gamers.com