Memory Scaling on Haswell CPU, IGP and dGPU: DDR3-1333 to DDR3-3000 Tested with G.Skill
by Ian Cutress on September 26, 2013 4:00 PM ESTFor our single discrete GPU testing, rather than the 7970s which normally adorn my test beds (and were being used for other testing), I plumped for one of the HD 6950 cards I have. This ASUS DirectCU II card I purchased pre-flashed to 6970 specifications, giving a little more oomph. Typically discrete GPU options are not often cited as growth areas of memory testing, however we will let the results speak for themselves.
Dirt 3: Average FPS
Dirt 3 commonly benefits from boosts in both CPU and GPU power, showing near-perfect scaling in multi-GPU configurations. When using our HD6950 however there seems to be little difference between memory settings with no trend.
Dirt 3: Minimum FPS
Minimum frame rates show a different story – Dirt 3 seems to prefer setups with a lower CL – MHz does not seem to have any effect.
Bioshock Infinite: Average FPS
Single GPU frame rates for Bioshock has no direct effect for memory changes with less than 2% covering our range of tests.
Bioshock Infinite: Minimum FPS
One big sink in frame rates seems to be for 1333 C7, although given that C8 and C9 do not have this effect, I would presume that this is more a statistical outlier than an obvious trend.
Tomb Raider: Average FPS
Again, we see no obvious trend in average frame rates for a discrete GPU.
Tomb Raider: Minimum FPS
While minimum frame rates for Tomb Raider seem to have a peak (1600 C8) and a sink (2400 C12), this looks to be an exception rather than the norm, with minimum frame rates typically showing 35.8 – 36.0 FPS.
Sleeping Dogs: Average FPS
Frame rates for Sleeping Dogs vary between 49.3 FPS and 49.6 FPS, showing no distinct improvement for certain memory timings.
Sleeping Dogs: Minimum FPS
The final discrete GPU test shows a small 5% difference from 1600 C11 to 2400 C11, although other kits perform roughly in the middle.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
89 Comments
View All Comments
tynopik - Thursday, September 26, 2013 - link
colors reversed on USB 3.0 Copy Test chart where green is given to the highest (worst) results and red is given to the lowest (best) resultsTegeril - Thursday, September 26, 2013 - link
These are the most colorblind-unfriendly images I've seen to date on this site.Razorbak86 - Friday, September 27, 2013 - link
You tell 'em, bro! Too bad he didn't put actual NUMBERS in the cells, instead of all those non-readable colors. ;)QChronoD - Friday, September 27, 2013 - link
Please redo the IGP gaming benchmarks with playable settings. All you did was waste your time testing at unreasonably high detail and not proven a single thing about whether the extra bandwidth is able to help increase performance.pdjblum - Friday, September 27, 2013 - link
Awesome work. Man, this must have taking forever, even with fast memory. Thanks so much.adityarjun - Friday, September 27, 2013 - link
CAS Latency is given as 6-7-8-9-10-11. What does that mean?http://www.flipkart.com/transcend-jetram-ddr3-8-gb...
Any help on which of these would be better and why?
http://www.flipkart.com/computers/computer-compone...
anton68 - Friday, September 27, 2013 - link
It'd be nice to see how the Iris Pro eDRAM affects compute performance when used as an L4 cache.pjdaily - Saturday, September 28, 2013 - link
I'd like to see this test too.MadAd - Friday, September 27, 2013 - link
Hi Ian, thanks for the review, could you explain the thinking behind using only 1360x768 for the gaming tests, especially for the single card benchmarks? Would stretching the single card with a memory intensive game at a high resolution change the results more towards IGPU fractions?This is more the scenario I would expect gamers to be facing and even if the answer turns out to be no, that in itself would be valuable data to learn.
merikafyeah - Friday, September 27, 2013 - link
Please, please, please incorporate some ramdisk benchmarks for these memory tests. It seems like such a given but no one seems to think of this, which is essentially the only test where you'll see some major differences between speed tiers. Things like gaming don't really result in differences worth your money.I recommend Primo Ramdisk for its rock-solid stability but if you're looking for a free alternative I recommend SoftPerfect RAM Disk, which has been noted to be significantly faster than Primo, but may not be as stable under certain circumstances.