Will faster RAM improve my Ryzen 3 2200G's performance?

[Eurose]

I'm using a 2200G with 8GB of some cheapo green PCB Samsung RAM at 2133MHz (rough times), and I'm getting frame drops in Battle for Bikini Bottom, which I'm fairly certain my old i5-6400 and GTX 1050 setup was able to run without any slowdowns at all (I use default graphical settings because of the graphical glitch that requires an AR code to fix, and I was thinking of speedrunning the game, so no AR codes there.) Would 2933MHz RAM boost my performance enough to stay at 60 in this game at all times? Thanks

[JonnyH]

Maybe? This review (https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/rav...,5489.html) shows a ~30% increase in some game performance between 2133 and 2933 (though this is a 2400g, it is likely similar for a 2200g). But until you run dolphin and your specific game itself, you don't really know, as it may be limited in performance by things that don't scale well with ram speed, so there's no guarantee.

First, make sure you have dual-channel mode enabled (I *hope* you have 2x4gb sticks instead of a single 8gb) as that makes a massive difference, it also may be possible to use your current ram at a higher-than-stock frequency with a bit of tweakin - as it's pretty expensive right now for any ram, let alone 'good' fast ram.

[linkdude64]

I'm using a 2200G with 8GB of some cheapo green PCB Samsung RAM at 2133MHz (rough times), and I'm getting frame drops in Battle for Bikini Bottom, which I'm fairly certain my old i5-6400 and GTX 1050 setup was able to run without any slowdowns at all (I use default graphical settings because of the graphical glitch that requires an AR code to fix, and I was thinking of speedrunning the game, so no AR codes there.) Would 2933MHz RAM boost my performance enough to stay at 60 in this game at all times? Thanks

I doubt RAM would be your bottleneck, here. The RAM frequency is what the speed of the Infinity Fabric between the CCXs in the Ryzen CPU package is synced to, but since Dolphin is a Dual-Core application, unless you know it's running on separate CCXs (an open question) it wouldn't have *any* impact whatsoever.

Even still, IPC is what's critical here, so given that you can't add more transistors to your CPU, all you can hope for is to increase your frequency. Are you running the stock cooler? If so, I would HIGHLY recommend a Hyper 212+Evo, IMO it's worth the difference over the non-evo with the much more silent and performant fan, but you make the call. You will get less thermal throttling and maybe even some headroom for overclocking your CPU if your mobo supports it. A good heatsink is a very sound investment, especially with a Ryzen build, because if one day you decide to use that same motherboard with a CPU and discrete GPU, the heatsink will still be usable, and it will almost certainly give you a more noticable performance increase (when gaming or otherwise using both the CPU and GPU simultaneously) than the RAM frequency increase would - and at a MUCH lower cost than new RAM. Both Ryzen and Vega are very power-hungry, and so both units together means they'll slow each other down unless they're properly cooled. I don't have a 2200G, but you might be able to find more info online about when they begin to throttle their temps and see if you're anywhere close to that.

[mstreurman]

I doubt RAM would be your bottleneck, here. The RAM frequency is what the speed of the Infinity Fabric between the CCXs in the Ryzen CPU package is synced to, but since Dolphin is a Dual-Core application, unless you know it's running on separate CCXs (an open question) it wouldn't have *any* impact whatsoever.

Even still, IPC is what's critical here, so given that you can't add more transistors to your CPU, all you can hope for is to increase your frequency. Are you running the stock cooler? If so, I would HIGHLY recommend a Hyper 212+Evo, IMO it's worth the difference over the non-evo with the much more silent and performant fan, but you make the call. You will get less thermal throttling and maybe even some headroom for overclocking your CPU if your mobo supports it. A good heatsink is a very sound investment, especially with a Ryzen build, because if one day you decide to use that same motherboard with a CPU and discrete GPU, the heatsink will still be usable, and it will almost certainly give you a more noticable performance increase (when gaming or otherwise using both the CPU and GPU simultaneously) than the RAM frequency increase would - and at a MUCH lower cost than new RAM. Both Ryzen and Vega are very power-hungry, and so both units together means they'll slow each other down unless they're properly cooled. I don't have a 2200G, but you might be able to find more info online about when they begin to throttle their temps and see if you're anywhere close to that.

If he is using a Ryzen CPU and especially also the VEGA iGPU... then there will be a HUGE increase in speed if the RAM speed goes up (seen up to 50% in some PC games). About every review/benchmark shows that. I don't think a better heatsink will change a lot, if anything. Especially if he doesn't hit the thermal limits nothing will change, but without any information about the temps... we don't know anything.

@OP Most important as said before make sure you run Dual Channel, it basically doubles the throughput of your RAM, and from there on out, try to get faster RAM and you will see at least some increase. But since I do not own a Ryzen myself I am unable to tell you exactly what the changes will be for Dolphin.

[linkdude64]

HUGE increase in speed

Yes, but in the context? It's true about the memory speeds and the performance of the baked-in gpu, but which do you think is more likely, that he's not maintaining 60fps because of his GPU, or because of his CPU? If he is unable to get 60fps at 1xIR with the power of that particularly good iGPU compared to Intels/others, even at the "lower" RAM speeds (it's still DDR4 with a more powerful iGPU, when Dolphin runs fine on less powerful iGPUs with DDR3) I'm leaning heavily toward CPU being the issue, and from there, the reasoning follows - Ryzen will not let itself "Frequency boost" so long as it's not well  within its temperature range, at least from what I've seen of the CPUs. Even then, the "boosts" in my experience, are not responsive and "sticky" enough to give smooth framerates when you are CPU limited. On my 1600x, which never goes above about 45C when running Dolphin, with its advertised "boost" capabilities of up to 4.0Ghz, Dolphin runs choppier (however slightly) and runs the Dolphin benchmark slower at stock/auto-adjusting speeds with boosts enabled (on the dev build benchmark, not the 5.0 stable benchmark) than with the CPU set at a steady and stable OC of 3.9Ghz, for example. So IMO a slight CPU OC would be more helpful, in which case the stock cooler will likely not be enough, but theres more to OC than just the heatsink, so this is all academic, of course...

Edit: Either way, I hope we can find OP's issue and get him going! Any feedback/thoughts OP?

[mstreurman]

Yes, but in the context? It's true about the memory speeds and the performance of the baked-in gpu, but which do you think is more likely, that he's not maintaining 60fps because of his GPU, or because of his CPU? If he is unable to get 60fps at 1xIR with the power of that particularly good iGPU compared to Intels/others, even at the "lower" RAM speeds (it's still DDR4 with a more powerful iGPU, when Dolphin runs fine on less powerful iGPUs with DDR3) I'm leaning heavily toward CPU being the issue, and from there, the reasoning follows - Ryzen will not let itself "Frequency boost" so long as it's not well  within its temperature range, at least from what I've seen of the CPUs. Even then, the "boosts" in my experience, are not responsive and "sticky" enough to give smooth framerates when you are CPU limited. On my 1600x, which never goes above about 45C when running Dolphin, with its advertised "boost" capabilities of up to 4.0Ghz, Dolphin runs choppier (however slightly) and runs the Dolphin benchmark slower at stock/auto-adjusting speeds with boosts enabled (on the dev build benchmark, not the 5.0 stable benchmark) than with the CPU set at a steady and stable OC of 3.9Ghz, for example. So IMO a slight CPU OC would be more helpful, in which case the stock cooler will likely not be enough, but theres more to OC than just the heatsink, so this is all academic, of course...

Edit: Either way, I hope we can find OP's issue and get him going! Any feedback/thoughts OP?

Well, we have to keep in mind that his "old" PC with an i5 6400 and a GTX1050 is a lot faster than that/any unclocked Ryzen in Dolphin.

The only thing I can think of is that he might need to Use Vulkan and not use ubershaders... (Shader Compilation: Synchronous)

But we are missing crucial information here: What are the exact settings being used?
We don't even know what version of Dolphin he is using since changing from VS2015 to VS2017 (which happened long after 5.0-stable) seems to make a huge difference in performance for Ryzen...

@OP at least make sure to download the latest Dev-version from the top of the download page. Extract it to a new and empty folder and create an empty portable.txt in the same folder as dolphin.exe, do not touch any settings except for changing the Controllers to something more useful and putting the Backend to Vulkan (that would be my advise for Vega) See if that changes anything.

[AnyOldName3]

@linkdude64 The 2000-series Ryzens have a much better boost system, so while they still don't go for their maximum boost without plenty of thermal headroom, they'll at least boost most of the way there. It's also not just the IGPU that's highly dependent on memory speeds as they didn't completely fix the thing where Ryzen spends a lot of time waiting for data.

[linkdude64]

But we are missing crucial information here: What are the exact settings being used?
We don't even know what version of Dolphin he is using since changing from VS2015 to VS2017 (which happened long after 5.0-stable) seems to make a huge difference in performance for Ryzen...

Very true, and that is getting down to brass tacks...In my unscientific stable-vs-dev version Dolphin benchmark tests I saw around 23-25% performance increase, so hopefully we hear back from OP soon.

AnyOldName3,
That is good information to have; all I'd heard about the memory speeds regarding the CPU was the CCX/Infinity Fabric stuff. I was thinking CPU was what we needed to be focused on, here. If he doesnt' have an OC capable motherboard, or isn't comfortable voiding his warranty, XFB is his only hope...

[Eurose]

I'm using the latest dev build, D3D11. It's already OCed to 3.9GHz too (stock cooler) My last option would be to swap out my 2200G for a 2400G (~£30 loss, not that bad, extra MT performance too)

[DJBarry004]

When we asked for your settings, we meant -all- of them (Are you using ubershaders? Any amount of AA? How high did you set the IR?).