RAM Disks for gaming... irrelevant nowadays?
- Thread starter Gimpymoo
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Caporegime
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I've considered installing games on a RAM Disc, but really I think you need 32GB.
With 16GB RAM, I think I run the risk of running out of RAM because I need 12GB in a RAM Disc for games.
load time would probably be insane though.
With 16GB RAM, I think I run the risk of running out of RAM because I need 12GB in a RAM Disc for games.
load time would probably be insane though.
There is a video on YT showing the loading times between a Mech Drive, SSD & RAM Disk on BF3. Needless to say, the RAM disk is soo much quicker than a single SSD.
Man of Honour
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I can't imagine that the benefits would ever outweigh the hassle given that most of us are on SSDs now. Saving 5 seconds of loading time doesn't really sound like an advantage when you have to copy everything from SSD/HDD to ram after each reboot (which you can guarantee will take more than 5 seconds).
And as Martini mentioned, you'll need to be running an absolute ton of ram.
And as Martini mentioned, you'll need to be running an absolute ton of ram.
I run FSX on a PC with 16GB of RAM. The first load after a power cycle will take a good 8-10 minutes! Quit and reload and it's around the 30 second mark. My FSX is on a mixture of SSD and spinner drives, photo scenery is quite large. I think Win7 is doing a pretty good job of caching stuff making me think a RAM disk wouldn't really help much. Did that YT video take in to account the time to load the ram disk or ensure that the loads of BF3 were the 1st / 2nd etc? So much to mess with timings 
Its not really RAM is still massively faster and it would be noticeable. But saying that its probably not worth the hassle given the size of most games now.
Massive thread on the SWTOR forums about creating a RAM drive running the game from there etc.
The hassle involved, the fixing required.
Watched the videos, decided that my machine running on fast Samsung SSD's loaded within mili-seconds of the RAM drive setup.
Easily decided just not worth the hassle.
The hassle involved, the fixing required.
Watched the videos, decided that my machine running on fast Samsung SSD's loaded within mili-seconds of the RAM drive setup.
Easily decided just not worth the hassle.
I dabbled with the original Gigabyte RAMdrives (pre-SSD) and also used RAMdisks from 3Gb to 12Gb for Arma 2/3 (housing mods on the RAMdisk, not the game itself). They used to help massively due to the amount of data steamed from disks, so FPS was not improved but texture pop ups ad loading times all were good. Have tried using RAMdisks as cache for SSDs, but to be honest I now just run games from SSDs with HDDs for mass storage of everything else.
cj
cj
I used to run Quakeworld from a RAMdisk, as it made entering the server on map change marginally quicker and also reduced the lag associated with taking screenshots etc
Nowadays with SSDs the advantage is much less and not really worth the hassle, it impacts on startup/shutdown time as you have to load/[save] the image on every reboot.
Finally modern versions of Windows tend to be better at caching via superfetch and suchlike so if you are regularly playing the same game I would imagine that helps out a bit too.
Nowadays with SSDs the advantage is much less and not really worth the hassle, it impacts on startup/shutdown time as you have to load/[save] the image on every reboot.
Finally modern versions of Windows tend to be better at caching via superfetch and suchlike so if you are regularly playing the same game I would imagine that helps out a bit too.