Intel Haswell DDR3 Memory Performance Impact On Graphics

OpenArena 0.8.5 is the least demanding OpenGL Linux game that was used for this Haswell graphics memory bandwidth benchmarking. Between DDR3-800 and DDR3-1066 there wasn't any real difference in performance, but in going from 1066MHz to 1333MHz the frame-rate increased by 18% for the low-end Haswell HD Graphics 4400. When bumping it to DDR3-1600MHz, the frame-rate rose by another 9%, or nearly 30% faster performance with DDR3-1600MHz over DDR3-1066MHz.

With the newer and more demanding OpenArena 0.8.8 release, having DDR3-1600MHz memory increased the performance by about 30% as well from a 50% increase in the DDR3 system memory frequency.

The demanding Unigine Sanctuary and Unigine Tropics workloads saw slight performance increases when running at DDR3-1333 and DDR3-1600.