Corsair Dominator Platinum 16GB 3200MHz DDR4 Memory Kit Review
Metro Last Light and 3DMark Sky Diver
Metro Last Light
Metro: Last Light is a first-person shooter video game developed by Ukrainian studio 4A Games and published by Deep Silver. The game is set in a post-apocalyptic world and features action-oriented gameplay with a combination of survival horror elements. It uses the 4A Game engine and was released in May 2013.
Metro: Last Light was benchmarked at 1920x1080with low image quality settings with the SSAA set to off, Tesselation disabled and and 4x AF. We used the game titles built-in benchmark (seen above) and ran it 3 times at each screen resolution to ensure accurate results.
Benchmark Results: The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 Titan video card made short work of Metro: Last Light with these low settings, but we wanted to didn’t want the GPU to be the bottleneck of the system as we were wanting to see if the memory bandwidth was holding the X99 platform back. We jumped up from an average FPS of 149.2 to 153.33 by going from 2133MHz to 2666MHz with tight timings. We have found for years that you often get a larger performance increase when it comes to gaming from running tighter timings than running higher clock frequencies and that proves to be the case here again. The Corsair Dominator Platinum 16GB 3200MHz DDR4 memory kit didn’t really bring a performance boost to the table despite having a higher clock speed. Even with the tightest timings possible on the kit we were unable to match what we were able to to with tight timings on a lesser clocked memory kit.
Futuremark 3DMark Sky Diver
3DMark Sky Driver is the latest test in the worlds most popular benchmark for measuring the 3D graphics performance of gaming PCs. Sky Diver includes a Demo, two Graphics tests, a Physics test and a Combined test. The Graphics tests measure GPU performance, the Physics test measures CPU performance, and the Combined test stresses both GPU and CPU. The Demo does not affect the score.
Graphics test 1 focuses on tessellation and uses a forward lighting method. Graphics test 2 focuses on pixel processing and uses compute shader-based deferred tiled lighting.
The Physics test introduces a new approach that extends the performance range for which the test is relevant. The test runs through four levels of work starting with the lightest and continuing to the heaviest unless the frame rate drops below a minimum threshold. The GPU load is kept as low as possible to ensure that only the CPU is stressed. The test uses the Bullet Open Source Physics Library.
The Combined test contains both graphics workloads and physics simulations to stress the CPU and GPU. The test uses a compute shader-based deferred tiled lighting method.
Results: We spoke with Oliver Baltuch over at Futuremark and he informed us that the new Sky Diver benchmark test in the latest version of 3DMark has the best physics test and that it would be the ideal test to run for our Haswell-E test platform. We found that the overall Sky Diver score along with the Physics and Graphics test scores increased as we went from 2133Mhz to 3200Mhz memory clock speeds with the various timings. The Physics portion of this benchmark best shows the memory performance and we scored 17,611 points with the default settings versus 17,748 with the tightened timings.