Crucial Ballistix Sport DDR4 2400MHz 32GB 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, which is a minor 3% FPS increase. This isn’t a significant performance increase, but it does show that increasing the memory bandwidth above the JEDEC standard of 2133MHz will help in some gaming situations. It should be noted that we got a larger performance increase from the tighter timings than the clock frequency increase.
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 2666Mhz memory clock speeds with the various timings. The Physics score went from 16806 on the Crucial Ballistix Sport 32GB 2400MHz DDR4 memory kit to 17724 when overclocked up to 2666MHz with CL12 timings. This is a 5.4% difference.