Because modern CPUs are on platforms that support only DDR5.
If you are a gamer, chances are you want one of the AMD X3D CPUs. Whilst AMD did produce 5600X3D, 5700X3D and the highly sought after 5800X3D, these are effectively unobtainable now (outside of the Used Market, which is already about 2X MSRP).
You are effectively forced into AM5 (or whatever Intel is doing) and they require DDR5. You don't have the "choice" to use DDR4 anymore in most circumstances.
If your question is more of a hypothetical (assuming we could use newer CPUs with DDR4 or even DDR3) the answer is a bit more blurred, but at least in a lot of gaming workloads, you aren't memory speed bound. There is some performance regressions, sometimes up to 15%, but a lot of this is negated with the X3D chips anyways (:
Whilst I tend to agree, I also don't recommend just pasting every command from ChatGPT into your machine without having some understanding/validating process.
I honestly believe one of the main, highly supported Distros like:
Debian, Arch, Fedora, Gentoo, Ubuntu, Nix, etc are all better choices than Catchy, Manjaro, Bazzite or whatever else niche distro exists.
I commonly find myself running into weird issues that I would of never run into otherwise. Bazzite for example by default, opens Steam on boot. This caused my games drives to not be mapped in Steam. (I assume Steam somehow booted before my drives were properly mapped) I helped my friend for hours troubleshooting his fstab config, rebooting, etc, but then realized it was just a default that he never set.
He quit Linux because of this (and some other minor gripes) and I don't think the gaming distros do much to properly help.
This seemingly is a common problem with the Steam Hardware Report, with Chinese users being erroneously represented. It constantly gets fixed, although takes a bit. It could be the hardware surveys are sent out at a different time compared to the rest of the world, then combined in the following month.
This is proven by "Ended 2025 at around a 3.5% marketshare, dipped a bit in January, and fell to 2.23% in February."
The other aspect I find interesting is the February spike in win10 usage, presumably from Chinese users. Where will they migrate to over the coming years as support goes away. They seem to be both resisting win11 and resisting linux perhaps as either it's not suitable for the games (online?) they play or not great for Chinese users, or perhaps along with the nvidia spike because of getting more out of those GPUs on windows.
It's because of the Chinese user influx during their holiday season. Valve is not correcting anything they are just showing the data. As usual, Phoronix is misinterpreting what they're looking at.
It's about oversampling. Due how the survey is sent, a massive influx of machines coming online all at once will be more likely to trigger the survey. They know the general composition of their users, so they need the survey to be around the ballpark of that.
This ends up being pretty good value if you are a heavy AI user and believe in Google's product offering.
Google's models are still a bit behind Anthropic, although for the same monthly price you get the Google suite of products, 5TB of storage, access to Veo, Nano Banana Pro, Flow and Whisk, plus Gemini.
I asked Claude on the $20 plan to rewrite the Linux Kernel and ffmpeg in Rust (using Opus 4.6, Ultra Thinking) with high verbosity and it ran out of usage!
If you are a gamer, chances are you want one of the AMD X3D CPUs. Whilst AMD did produce 5600X3D, 5700X3D and the highly sought after 5800X3D, these are effectively unobtainable now (outside of the Used Market, which is already about 2X MSRP).
You are effectively forced into AM5 (or whatever Intel is doing) and they require DDR5. You don't have the "choice" to use DDR4 anymore in most circumstances.
If your question is more of a hypothetical (assuming we could use newer CPUs with DDR4 or even DDR3) the answer is a bit more blurred, but at least in a lot of gaming workloads, you aren't memory speed bound. There is some performance regressions, sometimes up to 15%, but a lot of this is negated with the X3D chips anyways (:
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