Does fast ram make a difference at very low frames?

[rn2]

I'm talking about building games that are not bottlenecked by the graphics card and more so the CPU.

Games like planet coaster which the cpu has to calculate all of the guests which drags the framerate down.

Does faster ram make a difference with this when the cpu is struggling and frames are around 30fps or is it all just directly bottlenecked by the cpu?

I realise that faster ram can increase frames at the higher numbers so I would imagine it would be the same at the lower frame rates.



Also for example, if your faster ram increases your frames by 10% will that 10% calculate to the lower frames? eg. 10% of 144 is 14.4 = 14 more frames and 10% of 30 = 3 frames, if that is the case I probably won't bother overclocking my ram.

I have been thinking about this for a while so thought I'd ask some people who could shed some light for me. I think I am right but would like to clarify just incase.

 

[pp111]

I remember when things were simple, we used to say that about 50% of the system speed was down to the CPU and 50% to the RAM. So if the system is struggling then increasing the RAM speed by 100% would speed up the entire system by 50%. Course these days it's really no so simple. For a start you need a calculator to even work out which is the fastest RAM because timings and frequency affect speed and often as you increase frequency you downgrade timings so buying "faster RAM" can make little or no difference.....and many other things have changed since those simple days so it's really not so easy to calculate what's going to happen. So if you have clearly faster RAM then it will help a struggling CPU, but by how much depends on too many factors to calculate.

 

[alec]

Simple to test for that
Drop your ram speed couple notches, see if it becomes measurably slower. That would mean that getting couple notches faster memory is likely to help.

As a rule, CPU bottlenecked games will like fast (low-latency) memory. There is little complex in-cache calculation there, so bulk of work is moving data to and from memory.
Of course with planet coaster it is a horrible unoptimised mess and no amount of fast CPU or fast memory will fix it. But improve, yes.