AMD Radeon RAMDISK

[ViRGE]

Unless it is automatic similar to intel srt i don't see much use for the said feature.

It isn't. AMD is just distributing a branded version of Dataram's RAMDisk software, which doesn't do a whole heck of a lot besides creating a RAMdisk. Even ASRock's cruddy XFast software would technically have more functionality.

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/dataram-executes-agreement-with-amd-for-radeon-ramdisk-2012-09-06

"AMD intends to offer special Radeon RAMDisk incentives for those purchasing AMD Value, Entertainment, Performance and Radeon Edition memory products. "

This mostly seems to be a solution in search of a problem, IMHO. SSDs have really done a number on RAMdisks.

 

[mikeymikec]

This mostly seems to be a solution in search of a problem, IMHO. SSDs have really done a number on RAMdisks.

Maybe.

The number one problem with RAMdisks is that the data doesn't survive a reboot, so in comes the concept of a recoverable RAMdisk, where the data is saved to a storage system (possibly on shutdown) and typically reloaded during the OS startup-sequence. The problem potentially there is the increased OS boot time, possibly increased shutdown time (or some clever in between solution which writes the data back to disc through some scheduled delayed write-back scheme), and a possible "what if the system is shut down unexpectedly?" scenario.

I played around with recoverable RAMdisk solutions myself, trying different techniques to improve performance such as unzipping the data from a minimally compressed archive file rather than loading an entire RAMdisk image or copying the files from HDD to RAMdisk.

With an SSD you can load/save the RAMdisk files to disk an order of magnitude faster. It still begs the question as to why one might want a RAMdisk in the first place and whether it is worth the faffing around.

When I played with RAMdisks, I was using Win2k/XP. My reasons were to improve Firefox/Thunderbird/Sunbird/OpenOffice's cold start times, and in that purpose the system I had in place was a success. I think however when I upgraded to a faster HDD, I tried not using a RAMdisk and found the experience to be borderline tolerable. However with Vista/7 and SuperFetch, I get vastly improved app start times, so for me the benefit of an SSD (esp. at their current price) or a RAMdisk is questionable (yes, I've tried an SSD in a customer's computer build recently - while I was impressed by the cold start times, and the thought of how quickly modern game levels would load from an SSD gives me warm fuzzy feelings).

If I had enough RAM I might try StarCraft 2 from a RAMdisk as an experiment, but SC2 has about 16GB of data the last time I checked, loading that from HDD to RAM would take a painfully long time.

My point is, SSDs are a game changer, but RAMdisks still wipe the floor with them unless you're using DDR266 RAM. RAMdisks always were a niche, but the goalposts for an effective RAMdisk setup have been moved. Some people will always want more performance for one reason or another.

 

[Idontcare]

This mostly seems to be a solution in search of a problem, IMHO. SSDs have really done a number on RAMdisks.

This is true, I can speak to it from personal experience.

My real-world app of interest is Metatrader 4, and when operating in its strategy testing mode with my particular trading algorithms it churns through the small file I/O's like mad.

My initial solution from long ago was to use Iram drives in raid0. That helped with the small file IOPs.

^dual Iram in raid-0 on areca 1280ML card w/2GB cache

Then I went to ramdisk with superspeed because it was easier to maintain than the irams which had no automated image creation and restoration during system shutdowns like the superspeed ramdisk do.

^5GB of DDR2-800 ramdisk

But then along came SSD's and completely disrupted that marketspace. Oodles more capacity at a fraction of the cost and for all I could ever determine they delivered the same effective performance as far as my apps were concerned.

^140GB Intel G2 on areca 1280ML card w/2GB cache

The benefit of a ramdisk over traditional disks was the small file IOPs - exactly where SSD's deliver. The benefit of today's ramdisks are not in the small file IOPs but in the large file transfers which can be GB/s.

Today's SSD's are so fast that I've ditched the 1280ML card (a $1400 investment) and just connect the SSD straight to my mobo.

^ OCZ Vertex3 on MIVE-Z

Meanwhile my superspeed ramdrive has continued to benefit an improve in performance from the advances in ram speed, but I don't use the ramdrive for anything other than benchmarking tests because the SSD is fast enough and far and away more convenient to manage at a practical level on a daily basis.

^ juicy performance but still not worth the frustrations of randomly losing your ramdisk image file in the event of an non-routine system shutdown (BSOD, system hang, etc).

As a former ramdisk believer and user, and as a person who still needs and uses the kind of performance a ramdisk offers, I won't touch a ramdisk ever again unless for some reason flash-based SSD's became non-existent.

IMO the sun has set on the consumer ramdisk scene.

 

[podspi]

It isn't. AMD is just distributing a branded version of Dataram's RAMDisk software, which doesn't do a whole heck of a lot besides creating a RAMdisk. Even ASRock's cruddy XFast software would technically have more functionality.

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/dataram-executes-agreement-with-amd-for-radeon-ramdisk-2012-09-06

"AMD intends to offer special Radeon RAMDisk incentives for those purchasing AMD Value, Entertainment, Performance and Radeon Edition memory products. "

This mostly seems to be a solution in search of a problem, IMHO. SSDs have really done a number on RAMdisks.

Haha, I had a feeling it was Dataram's... That is a decent product, but as I said before, limited practicality.

 

[anikhtos]

The only real problem with the ramdisk it is its capacity.
Now we have started shipping 8gb modules so we can use the theoretical 32gig of sandy ivy bridge. As people said the games now can easily go to 16gb+
so you need to have 32 gb to make a big ramdrive to fit the game and still have a descent amount left.

if mobos and cpus supported more ram and the ram was available ramdrives would be another story.

my first computer was at 1995 it was a pentium 75mhz with 16 mbyte edo ram.
even for that 16 megabyte i paid a lot of premium.
all the mobos that time was listing of 1 giga max ram!!!!!!! well you could not go anywhere closer to that number. with windows 95 the out of memory was so frequent. At last after 64 mbyte ram win95 start acting nice and after 128 ram there was practically no improvement on how it acted. to go from 16 to 128 it was a painfull and reall expensive process for me. so around 1998 i had 256mbyte ram to my system. at last enough memory to make a ramdrive and have still good amount of ram. But at that time the sizes of files where going so up. Games start using the full space of the cd, so ramdrive are there why they luck the capacity.

If you could make a ramdrive of 60 giga at a price of even 3x the cost of an ssd then ramdrives would still be on the game. Their size was always their limiting factor to this interesting technology. And after all a working drive is always promt to failure.

with my pII233 system and 384 ram i made a boot cd create a ramdrive of 256 mbyte copied the windows installation into it and boot. I had also office 95 installed and 20 mbyte free. It was a good option to browse the net not worrying about viruses.

 

[Dark Shroud]

I've seen i7 systems with massive RAMDISKs in them. The software would back-up & rebuild the RAMDISK from an OCZ Revodrive.

It took me a few minutes to find this link.

http://www.slashgear.com/ramrod-powerbox-gaming-pc-review-25229907/

 

[Dresdenboy]

RAMDisks aint something new. Even my Amiga 500 had one. Rebranding an existing RAMDisk wont give magical results. Not to mention hiding the huge downsides of RAMDisks.

Entire article is here btw:
http://news.softpedia.com/news/AMD-Radeon-RAMDisk-Will-Make-Games-525-Faster-295452.shtml

And that slide is so full of BS. They also forgot to test against an SSD. It would yield about the same results as a RAMDisk due to the compression and package techniques used in games and apps. You are CPU limited way before storage speed limited. And will be so as long as HDs are around.

The Amiga RAMDisk had the advantage of dynamically resizing. This would be better today since memory could be used as disk or physical RAM as needed. Disk caches had a similar function but somehow played against virtual memory swapping in older Windows variants.

I did not find such a flexible RAMDisk for Windows. Maybe someone knows? So far I used Gavotte RAMDisk under XP, none yet under Win 7.

One performance related aspect could be that of dynamically loaded game worlds as they are used in several of today's games.

 

[sm625]

I have mixed feelings about this. I've been migrating recently my games from a slowpoke Samsung Spinpoint F3 1TB to my Samsung 830. In some games is noticable (WoW,Diablo 3) but in most of them is like minus 1-2 seconds from loading and that's it. Shogun 2 campaign used to be irritating since you switch constantly between map mode / battle mode and it had 1 minute 30 second loading in that phase. When I installed it on the SSD I expected a 1/3 or 1/4 of the loading time but was pretty dissapointed to see that it was around 1 minute and ~ 10 second. Kinda like +20% gain, from a 5x-10x faster disk. So judging by that, that Shogun 2 graph is waaay out of realistic expectations.

Possibly, but keep in mind that ram is different from storage. The library calls that get made will be entirely different, and it could be the slop inside the sata code that creates the delay. In other words there could be parts of the storage driver (or the game engine which interacts with the storage driver) that contain hardcoded delays after every x number of bytes read. With a ramdisk, those delays might be skipped entirely. In my experience (I owned and used a gigabyte I-RAM) ramdisks dont do much for level load times.

 

[SolMiester]

My ASRock board has that too....

 

[ViRGE]

Jesus Jumping Jehoshaphat, my head may implode here.

http://blogs.amd.com/play/2012/10/10/give-your-pc-a-boost-with-amd-radeon-ramdisk/

This version allows anyone to create a RAMDisk that can reserve up to 4GB of your RAM, while users with AMD Radeon™ memory will automatically be able to reserve up to 6GB. Finally, enthusiasts have the option of upgrading to the AMD Radeon™ RAMDisk Xtreme, which allows users to create RAMDisks up to 64GB for under $20USD

Meanwhile back at Dataram.com

Purchase RAMDisk Personal
($18.99 USD)
UNLEASH THE POWER
Supports disk sizes
greater than 4 GB

AMD isn't even giving away the full version of software for free, they're literally rebranding it and reselling it. You could have purchased the software directly from Dataram last week (or even last year) for the same price and received the same thing. AMD is adding absolutely nothing value-wise.:|

 

[Phynaz]

AMD needs to outsource their entire marketing department to someone even half way competent. First the Android emulator farce, then the AMD accelerator fiasco, and now this.

Although I guess my mother-in-law would fall for this :\

 

[ShintaiDK]

Thats just getting nasty. Its also a shotgun approach. Try everything, hope something works?

One can only wonder how such people avoided the layoffs.

 

[Idontcare]

AMD is adding absolutely nothing value-wise.:|

Rory is helping AMD employees better understand the wall street way of unlocking shareholder value

 

[ctsoth]

Rory is helping AMD employees better understand the wall street way of unlocking shareholder value

If only AMD stock had an unlocked multiplier..... Make sure you use voltage offset and a good cooler to keep the company from burning out too quickly....

 

[DiogoDX]

Free version avaliable. Up to 4GB ramdisk.

http://www.radeonramdisk.com/

AMD Radeon™ RAMDisk harnesses the untapped potential of your system's memory to deliver lightning reading and writing speed and dramatically accelerate the loading and processing times of games, web browsers and software suites.

Download your free trial today and begin creating disks up to 4GB using memory already in your system. If you've got AMD memory installed, enjoy creating disks up to 6GB (see 6GB Promotion Terms and Conditions).

Speed up internet page loads
Speed up disk-to-disk activities
Speed up PC game load times
Speed up software application loads and more
System Requirements
Memory Manufacturer: All
RAMDisk Capacity: Up to 4GB or 4096MB
Platform Compatibility: AMD or Intel-based systems
Operating System: Windows® 8, Windows 7, Windows Vista®
Installed System Memory: Minimum 4GB Recommended
Software Type: Freeware

System RAM Recommended RAM Drive Size
4GB Up to 1GB or 1024MB
6GB Up to 2GB or 2048MB
8GB Up to 4GB or 4096MB

 

[Idontcare]

Free version avaliable. Up to 4GB ramdisk.

http://www.radeonramdisk.com/

Looks a lot like dataram's freeware version.

Maybe AMD's is recompiled so it benefits from the enhanced acceleration offered by AMD's APUs?

 

[ShintaiDK]

Looks a lot like dataram's freeware version.

Maybe AMD's is recompiled so it benefits from the enhanced acceleration offered by AMD's APUs?

Is that a trollpost?

 

[Ferzerp]

Up next, AMD rebrands the classics like the Arnold Schwarzenegger soundboard, a fart app, acidwarp, and isorecorder...

Followed by forum posters exclaiming "Exciting news from AMD!"

 

[Idontcare]

Is that a trollpost?

If AMD is going to put their brand on it then one would hope they would at least go to the effort of recompiling the software with optimizations for their specific microarchitecture. Why wouldn't they? They pushed Cinebench to do that and they aren't rebranding cinebench.

 

[fread2281]

If AMD is going to put their brand on it then one would hope they would at least go to the effort of recompiling the software with optimizations for their specific microarchitecture. Why wouldn't they? They pushed Cinebench to do that and they aren't rebranding cinebench.

This isn't CPU intensive.

 

[ViRGE]

This isn't CPU intensive.

Indeed. RAMdisks aren't very complex. I'm not sure that AMD could do anything to improve performance even if they went over the source code line-by-line.

 

[Qianglong]

If AMD is going to put their brand on it then one would hope they would at least go to the effort of recompiling the software with optimizations for their specific microarchitecture. Why wouldn't they? They pushed Cinebench to do that and they aren't rebranding cinebench.

The value proposition here is if your system have AMD branded memory then the free version gives you 6GB instead of the 4GB. 6GB is a fairly decent size and I guess once you had a taste of the RAMDisk hopefully that will entice people to buy the full version.

For some gamers, you can put quite a bit of the texture files onto the RAMdisk and that will speed up the game load times and possibly reduce stuttering.

 

[Idontcare]

This isn't CPU intensive.

Indeed. RAMdisks aren't very complex. I'm not sure that AMD could do anything to improve performance even if they went over the source code line-by-line.

With the ramdisk software I use (superspeed ramdisk, ridiculously spendy compared to the dataram/AMD package) I historically only observe roughly 1/3 the available ram bandwidth as the usable bandwidth of the ramdrive itself.

For example, my dual-channel DDR3-2133 ramdrive peaks at under 10GB/s for read speed, but the available bandwidth is closer to 27GB/s.

I've always assumed this loss in bandwidth efficiency with my ramdrives was from the ramdrive software itself not being as optimal as the bandwidth testing programs themselves.

After all if Sisoft can pull 28 GB/s off of dual-channel DDR2-2133 then why can't Superspeed pull 28 GB/s of data off a ramdrive built on the same hardware?

If it isn't driver optimizations and CPU speed then I have to question how bandwidth testing is done in the first place.

 

[Termie]

Can someone explain how one actually uses a RAMdisk once it's created by this software? Do you have to copy files over to it before running an application?

For the record, I used to run a RAMdisk in the late 1980s on my Apple IIGS. I could load the entire OS into a RAMdisk created out of my 4MB of RAM. Now that made sense to me!

 

[ShintaiDK]

Can someone explain how one actually uses a RAMdisk once it's created by this software? Do you have to copy files over to it before running an application?

For the record, I used to run a RAMdisk in the late 1980s on my Apple IIGS. I could load the entire OS into a RAMdisk created out of my 4MB of RAM. Now that made sense to me!

Basicly you want to do something like:
Copy all the game files, but keep savegames for example under My Documents, games etc as they do as default today.

Issue is 3 fold. Size of game/application, speed of copy and any hardcoded paths.

Also if you start up from RAMDisk and it autopatches then you can loop that event until you also patch on HD/SSD. And possible if its badly coded you can go reinstall the app/game or play detective in registry.

In short, get an SSD and forget RAMDisks.