When comparing two memory technologies, it is important to evaluate not only the speed increase of the new technology, but also the underlying architecture. The Riftbreaker is a base-building, survival game with Action-RPG elements, and what makes it particularly useful for our testing is that it heavily utilizes the CPU. Riftbreaker utilizes core-heavy processors well and with thousands of units in-game it's a very heavy workload.

DDR5 does indeed include ECC (or error correction control) that can detect multi-bit errors and correct single-bit errors. It is, however, not what you’re expecting if your workload already requires the technology. As we just saw, DDR5 offers a 3% performance boost overall, but here we can see that gains were as large as 20% in games such as Far Cry 6 and Bright Memory. Other games to show strong gains include Watch Dogs Legion, Assassin's Creed Valhalla, The Riftbreaker, and Fortnite, to name a few. So why do this at all? It’s mostly being done because you can’t really quadruple the density of the chip without additional safety layers. Today, you’ll mostly only find ECC used in servers and workstations, because it’s done for mission critical reasons. The on-die ECC in DDR5 is just something had to be done to make the high speed and high density a possibility. But DDR5 supply is expected to improve next year, and so will pricing, so we wanted to take a more in-depth look at what DDR5 has to offer gamers when using an Alder Lake CPU, and this will help us determine at which point you should bother with the new memory technology.Fortnite also saw some benefit to using DDR5 memory, though for the most part the margins were less impressive. We did see a 12% boost to the 1% lows at 1080p, with a 6% improvement for the average frame rate and this was reduced to 5% at 1440p and then nothing at 4K. Microsoft for Business CouponExclusive: 20% off select Surface Pro 9 for Business + Type Cover Bundle You could argue that a 20% premium is worth it given we're already seeing examples of 20% gains in games. But you're better off saving the money for a future upgrade because the DDR5 available right now is going to be terrible when compared to DDR5 memory in a year or two. We saw the same thing happen with DDR4, and DDR3 before it. They all told us DDR5 availability would be poor, and pricing would be extreme, and they were right... Intel’s 12th-gen Alder Lake S chips actually support both DDR4 and DDR5 (along with low-power versions). Intel launched Alder Lake with DDR5 motherboards, but knowing that new technology brings higher prices and low availability, motherboards that also support 12th-gen Alder Lake and current DDR4 memory will be common for at least the first year or two. Is DDR5 more future proof?

It also depends on how you see your investment in RAM too. Paying a premium for DDR5 in 2021 or early 2022 means you can use that RAM when building a new system in 2026 (where you’d have to toss the DDR4). But typically it’s better just to upgrade to a new memory standard a few years after it drops, when the RAM will be larger, faster and cheaper. Will next-gen CPUs be faster with DDR4 or DDR5?If Raptor Lake does end up being a big step forward and worth upgrading to, you'd be best off just buying a new Z790 motherboard with DDR5 memory and selling the DDR4 gear second hand as it will retain its value well, Intel motherboards always do due to heavy product segmentation. At that point you should be getting a better motherboard anyway and much higher quality DDR5 memory at a significantly better price. Counter Strike Global Offensive is a heavily CPU limited game, and here we see feeding the processor more bandwidth doesn't help improve performance at 1080p and 1440p, though we're only talking about a minor single-digit difference. But it appears as though lower latency memory is more important for this title.