Battlefield 4 - Memory Performance

Recent blog posts over at Corsair suggested that the speed of your memory could also play a part, and we were keen to briefly put this to the test as well. We did this simply by decreasing our memory frequency through the usual stages from 2,400MHz to 1,333MHz and running the 1,920 x 1,080 test at all four presets with the fastest single GPU card overall, the R9 290X.





As with the CPU results, this is a fairly easy set of results to assess. There's a little more variation than we saw with the CPU tests, and a general pattern of a few lost frames as you get lower down the set of memory frequencies. However, it's only ever a maximum of 5 percent between the best and worst results (although they were still repeatable patterns). Therefore, while it appears that the engine does place some degree of stress on the memory subsystem, it's still hugely GPU limited, even at low settings.

As we said before, however, the CPU (and consequently the memory) could have a larger role to play when it comes to multiplayer, the mode where most people are likely to spend their BF4 playtime. Corsair's own testing was done on multiplayer servers, for example, and their system was also a Haswell one, whereas ours is an Ivy Bridge based rig, which could also make a difference. Much of this is speculation, of course, and there is (as ever) more room for testing how your memory specifications might affect performance in game.