I know nothing about actual goings on in a computer - what if the OS + game were loaded into the ram?

kute · 26 Mar 2023 at 22:30

I notice ram is getting pretty massive, you can get like 96 gb's fairly reasonably.

Just curious, if one was to have like 200 gigs of ram, and the OS + say... Cyberpunk was straight up running from the ram, would it make things a lot faster? At the very least, there'd be no loading right?

I hope I'm not embarrassing myself with this question - I dick around with computers a lot, but lack any actual indepth knowledge

drakulton · 26 Mar 2023 at 23:08

Theoretically possible, but you'd lose the game if you turned the pc off. I've seen someone do this on the interweb but currently unable to find it.

Hawk Tuah · 26 Mar 2023 at 23:16

They already are mostly in ram.... when they're running.

But ram is volatile, so when you turn your pc off, whatever was in there is gone.

In fact, Intel did bring our something similar to what you're suggesting, called Optane. Although, advances in NVME speeds have made it mostly redundant.

brendy · 26 Mar 2023 at 23:21

Ramdrive used to be a thing back in the windows 3.11 days, was good fun dicking about with it but as mentioned, as soon as you power down you had to redo the whole install etc.

Rroff · 27 Mar 2023 at 00:41

There used to be add-in boards with a battery and DIMMs you could install Windows to, etc. the problem was if the battery went flat you lost everything.

Also due to the way the OS/Software work it doesn't provide the advantage you'd hope as you still get files loaded from the area of memory they are resident in when stored and then parsed for information which is acted on or moved to a block of memory where the application wants them to be, uploaded to the GPU, etc. etc. which utilised the CPU which results in a reduction in performance compared to the pure throughput rate of the RAM.

brendy · 27 Mar 2023 at 00:59

SSDs these days are probably faster than the old memory that would have been in the dx4 100 powered systems etc back in the days.

Rroff · 27 Mar 2023 at 01:08

brendy said:
SSDs these days are probably faster than the old memory that would have been in the dx4 100 powered systems etc back in the days.

The latest NVME storage can match standard DDR2 RAM performance, at least for raw sequential throughput - probably not for other types of access.

tamzzy · 27 Mar 2023 at 01:24

Bug One said:
But ram is volatile, so when you turn your pc off, whatever was in there is gone.

brendy said:
Ramdrive used to be a thing back in the windows 3.11 days, was good fun dicking about with it but as mentioned, as soon as you power down you had to redo the whole install etc.

^

Capitano · 27 Mar 2023 at 11:11

if there's a game where you dont care about making any progress on, then theoretically yes. Whenever you turn off your PC, whatevers stored in the RAM goes

Bluecube · 27 Mar 2023 at 11:18

RAM disks were a thing back in the Amiga days. The option was built into the Workbench OS if I remember correctly. Linux certainly has the ability to create RAM disks.

To answer the OPs question, if the OS is capable of creating RAM disks then it's certainly possible to install a game to RAM and running it from there.

13oots2 · 27 Mar 2023 at 14:17

The way I am looking at it is SSDs are sort of a RAM but with memory chips that have a power source, bit slower than true RAM but far faster than a HD.

Mr Jack · 29 Mar 2023 at 13:13

kute said:
Just curious, if one was to have like 200 gigs of ram, and the OS + say... Cyberpunk was straight up running from the ram, would it make things a lot faster? At the very least, there'd be no loading right?

Probably, it'd make little or no difference compared to loading from a good SSD. When you're running an SSD, a lot of the time taken in loading isn't actually loading from disk; it's processing the files once they're loaded.

Rroff · 29 Mar 2023 at 13:17

Bluecube said:
RAM disks were a thing back in the Amiga days. The option was built into the Workbench OS if I remember correctly. Linux certainly has the ability to create RAM disks.

To answer the OPs question, if the OS is capable of creating RAM disks then it's certainly possible to install a game to RAM and running it from there.

Most OSes are capable of creating them and/or there is software to do it - RISC OS was, plenty of software which will do it with modern Windows, etc. - Windows doesn't officially have one built in but IIRC there is a driver kit for it if you want to create your own.

Mr Evil · 29 Mar 2023 at 16:56

Things effectively do run from RAM once the files have been read once, if you have enough RAM to hold everything. This is shown on the "Performance" tab the Task Manager in Windows; the memory labelled as "Standby" is cache. On my system that's currently ~40GB, which is bigger than most games in their entirety.

Loading times are often CPU limited though, so it doesn't always make much difference.

brendy said:
SSDs these days are probably faster than the old memory that would have been in the dx4 100 powered systems etc back in the days.

SSDs are insanely fast, but they still have latency measured in microseconds, compared to nanoseconds even for quite old RAM.

HangTime · 31 Mar 2023 at 22:43

I used to run some specific games on a ramdisk. I don't think it's need much these days with NVME and just natural caching of stuff into memory. It might help a bit in cases where you have to load a lot of textures etc but to be honest in those cases it is probably a big footprint anyway, would take up a lot of RAM and you'd have he ballache of loading it into the RAM drive every time you rebooted.