Crazy Idea? - Ram-disk for gaming

[WildW]

A (probably stupid) idea has just passed through my tiny head, after thinking about how my poor little hard drive struggles to load content during Oblivion, and to a lesser extent between levels in Battlefield 2. I have a fairly boring 500gig IDE thing at present.

What if you had a machine running Vista 64 with a big heap of ram (8 Gig would do for my purposes). Use some kind of software to create a good old-fashioned ram disk in memory - one that's big enough to hold the installed game folder (the bit you'd normally have on the hard drive.) Install the game into there, and run it from there. Say goodbye to Oblivion's loading-lag as data flies in from the ram disk faster than any drive you could imagine.

For convenience you'd want some way to then take an image of this ram drive and save it to a real disk, with something a bit Partion-Magic-like. Then next time you want to play, you spend a minute or so restoring the ram disk from your hard drive, and start the game.

Any reason why, with the proper software to make this sort of idea work, it might not be a great idea?

 

[myocardia]

Having your game loaded into a RAM drive would be utterly useless, especially since you'd need 20+GB, to only have a couple of games installed. Keep your game(s) installed on your hard drive, and use a RAM drive for your Windows swap file. Nearly all games these days write quote a bit of data to the swap file (called caching). Having 4GB Windows swap file in a RAM drive will make everything you do with your PC faster, including gaming.

 

[skace]

I have Vista 64 with 8GB of ram. Unlike Myocardia's suggestion, I've actually disabled my swap file (same idea but his requires a ton of work). So basically, I'm doing something similar to your original idea but without the messy ram disk work. The only thing your idea would do is eliminate initial load times. I still have the initial load times, however once it has been loaded and texture's are in memory, it never has to go back to disk except for something new.

You would need way more than 8gb of memory to do what yuo are thinking, unless you only ever play 1 game.

 

[WildW]

Originally posted by: skace

You would need way more than 8gb of memory to do what yuo are thinking, unless you only ever play 1 game.

I only ever play 1 game "at a time", so I only need one in the ram disk at once. A copy from hard disk into a ram disk would be maybe a minute for a 4 or 5 gig folder, and then no loading times while playing. I was thinking of Oblivion in particular (4.6 gig on hard drive, according to a quick Google) as it's known to cache in map data continuously as you wander around, and it can kill the frame rate a fair bit when it does.

As soon as you finish playing, ram drive deleted, memory is returned. Next time you play you restore from hard disk again. Nothing's saved into the game folder so nothing is lost. Save game still lives on your hard drive.

I don't know to what extent other more recent games might benefit.

 

[Modelworks]

It would be faster but you might run into some problems with games that use copy protection.
Securom can be picky about how a game is installed, like moving the directory after the install.

 

[Denithor]

What you really want is SuperSpeed RAMdisk Plus which handles the backup & restoration of the ramdisk contents before & after reboots. This software will also let you use more than 3.x GB of RAM under Windows XP 32-bit so you can install 8GB and mark out about 5GB for a RAMdisk, leaving 3GB for Windows to use.

What you want to do is set up the ramdisk then install Oblivion onto that drive. Then your savegames & everything will be kept in RAM and loads will be fast.

 

[Golgatha]

Originally posted by: Denithor
What you really want is SuperSpeed RAMdisk Plus which handles the backup & restoration of the ramdisk contents before & after reboots. This software will also let you use more than 3.x GB of RAM under Windows XP 32-bit so you can install 8GB and mark out about 5GB for a RAMdisk, leaving 3GB for Windows to use.

What you want to do is set up the ramdisk then install Oblivion onto that drive. Then your savegames & everything will be kept in RAM and loads will be fast.

Seems they charge $50 per 32bits :roll:

 

[myocardia]

Originally posted by: WildW
I only ever play 1 game "at a time", so I only need one in the ram disk at once. A copy from hard disk into a ram disk would be maybe a minute for a 4 or 5 gig folder, and then no loading times while playing. I was thinking of Oblivion in particular (4.6 gig on hard drive, according to a quick Google) as it's known to cache in map data continuously as you wander around, and it can kill the frame rate a fair bit when it does.

As soon as you finish playing, ram drive deleted, memory is returned. Next time you play you restore from hard disk again. Nothing's saved into the game folder so nothing is lost. Save game still lives on your hard drive.

I don't know to what extent other more recent games might benefit.

So, you want the game to be on a RAM disk, while still using your slow hard drive for all of the cached data?


edit: BTW, RAM drives are free, as long as you're using Windows. You'll need a 64-bit version of Windows, to use the free way, though. SuperSpeed allows you to access RAM above the 4GB 32-bit Windows limitation.

 

[Denithor]

Well, it's actually $50 for the 32-bit edition of the software. You set the ramdisk size to whatever you want.

An alternative would be this free Gavotte ramdisk. Looks like it also has image archive & restore tools (although not automatic like the superspeed version) so it could work as well. Give it a try and report back with results.

EDIT: myocardia beat me to it! Anyway, like he said, with XP 32-bit you are still going to be limited to the 32-bit memory cap (3.x GB) unless you pay for the superspeed plus version which somehow allows access to the additional ram installed.

Free on 32-bit OS
8GB installed
3.2GB OS "sees"
2GB needed for OS use
1GB available for RAMdisk

RAMdisk Plus on 32-bit OS
8GB installed
3.2GB OS "sees"
3GB allocated to OS
5GB available for RAMdisk

Free on 64-bit OS
8GB installed
8GB OS "sees"
3-4GB allocated to OS
4-5GB allocated to RAMdisk

So is it worth the $50 for the version that unlocks the extra RAM for use? If you're on XP/Vista 32-bit and want to make use of a 5GB RAMdisk it's the only way to do it.

 

[pcslookout]

Originally posted by: skace
I have Vista 64 with 8GB of ram. Unlike Myocardia's suggestion, I've actually disabled my swap file (same idea but his requires a ton of work). So basically, I'm doing something similar to your original idea but without the messy ram disk work. The only thing your idea would do is eliminate initial load times. I still have the initial load times, however once it has been loaded and texture's are in memory, it never has to go back to disk except for something new.

You would need way more than 8gb of memory to do what yuo are thinking, unless you only ever play 1 game.

Does your Vista 64 bit with 8 GB of ram and your swap file disabled feel a lot faster than when the swap file was enabled? Does windows or any program ever complain about you not having a swap file? How much ram did you use to have in Windows Vista ?

 

[Denithor]

Really the only advantage of the superspeed plus software would be access to more RAM on a 32-bit system. You could install and fully use 8GB of memory by pointing your windows pagefile, temp/tmp folders and your browser cache onto the RAMdisk. This could speed up your system nicely but I don't have experience with doing this (yet) so I really cannot comment on how well it works (or doesn't).

 

[Idontcare]

I use the superspeed ramdisk plus mentioned in this thread.

XP Pro 32bit with 8GB installed. XP sees 3.25GB and my ramdisk occupies 100% of the remaining memory that XP doesn't see (4.75GB). It is actually pretty neat, for me it is well worth the $50.

Why the 64bit version costs $100 is beyond me. Kinda ridiculous pricing but the only thing I could see as to why Superspeed feels the price is justified must have something to do with having signed drivers as well as supporting those gargantuan single-ramdisk sizes.

At any rate...to speak to the OP's question I believe this could work very well. Were I in your situation then I'd setup a ramdisk and then install your game to it per the usual game install process.

Then I'd manually create a backup location on your spindle drive. Then just copy-and-paste the entire install location from your ramdrive to the backup folder. Now you can delete the installed files from your ramdrive (leave the root-folder though) and with the newly created space install another game. Repeat.

Now when you want to actually play a game just copy-and-paste the files from your spindle-drive back to the root-folder on the ramdrive which the game was originally installed to. Then play as usual. It won't be any wiser to the fact it had been temporarily deleted from the ramdrive in the interim.

Don't forget to make a manual backup of your game files on the ramdisk before you delete them to make room for another game or you will lose your recent game save info obviously.

 

[Golgatha]

Time to buy some of these?

http://www.newegg.com/Product/...x?Item=N82E16820231181


I may have to give the free RAM disk option a whirl. Might do well to set the swap file there when playing games. Photoshop might like it as a scratch disk too.

 

[Denithor]

Those would be great, if they weren't $30/GB...

Idontcare, do you know the maximum amount of RAM the superspeed plus software can address? If you plunked in four of these for 16GB, on XP32, could you set up a 12-13GB RAMdisk?

 

[Juddog]

I have tried this with smaller games. It works great with loading times, but other than that you won't see a big speed improvement. On top of that, a lot of the newer games are getting to the 5 GB + size, which makes it near impossible to have enough RAM to RAMdisk it unless you are running 12 - 16 GB of RAM.

 

[skace]

Originally posted by: pcslookout
Does your Vista 64 bit with 8 GB of ram and your swap file disabled feel a lot faster than when the swap file was enabled? Does windows or any program ever complain about you not having a swap file? How much ram did you use to have in Windows Vista ?

Yes, it feels much faster. Ever minimized a program for hours, come back, click on it and have it resume instantly? Without even a pause? That's how mine works.

I've always had 8GB in Vista, I bought Vista64 and then said, what the hell, 8GB. My only comparison was to having 4GB in XP.

Some applications will crash after running for a long, long time, on memory allocation errors. I think it has something to do with improperly written code that never expects to hit any sort of 32bit limitation or whatnot. Not positive. Only happens rarely usually on poorly written stuff.

 

[myocardia]

Originally posted by: Juddog
I have tried this with smaller games. It works great with loading times, but other than that you won't see a big speed improvement. On top of that, a lot of the newer games are getting to the 5 GB + size, which makes it near impossible to have enough RAM to RAMdisk it unless you are running 12 - 16 GB of RAM.

That's because you weren't using the RAM disk as your Windows swap file. Who cares how fast a game loads the first time? That's the only benefit from installing any game to a RAM drive. The real benefit comes from using the RAM drive as your swap file-- no matter how long you play the game, every bit, byte, megabyte, and gigabyte of data that it uses, once it loads from the hard drive that first time, will be ~instantaneous. But only if it's caching to a RAM drive. If your RAM drive is full of the files that only needed to be loaded once, guess what? It only benefits you once.


edit: I just thought of something. The OP asked about Oblivion, which doesn't have "maps", so that's what I've been referencing this entire time. If you were playing, say, an FPS that uses maps, or any other way to break up the game into smaller sections, then having it installed into the RAM drive would be prefereable, since it would be coming from the RAM drive, then loaded into your normal system RAM. But, any game that doesn't uses maps of some sort, like Oblivion or M$'s flight simulators, you'd see much better performance from using the RAM drive as your Windows swap file, since that's where the game caches all of that data that it's continually caching.

 

[Denithor]

By swap file I assume you mean the pagefile? As in the virtual memory settings?

 

[myocardia]

Yeah, swapfile/pagefile/virtual memory. They're just three names for the same thing, at least to end users like ourselves.

edit: Oh, and I keep forgetting to mention that Photoshop absolutely loves having a 4GB RAM drive as it's scratch disk.

 

[skace]

Creating a ram disk just to put your swapfile on it is a ridiculously complex way of not having a swapfile at all (think about what the swapfile is, now think about how silly it is to move the swapfile into physical memory). If he creates a ramdisk, puts his program there and then removes the swapfile completely, he will have his and your benefits combined.

 

[Juddog]

Originally posted by: skace
Creating a ram disk just to put your swapfile on it is a ridiculously complex way of not having a swapfile at all (think about what the swapfile is, now think about how silly it is to move the swapfile into physical memory). If he creates a ramdisk, puts his program there and then removes the swapfile completely, he will have his and your benefits combined.

Unfortunately some programs simply refuse to load without a swapfile. I found this out the hard way.

 

[skace]

That sounds like an incredibly poorly written program whatever it was.

 

[myocardia]

Originally posted by: skace
If he creates a ramdisk, puts his program there and then removes the swapfile completely, he will have his and your benefits combined.

Umm, if his program/game is using up all of his extra RAM, and he has gotten rid of the pagefile/virtual memory, then he won't be running the program at all, at least not for more than a couple of minutes. He'll get to see what Windows does when it runs out of memory, though. Have you read this thread at all, BTW?

 

[skace]

Originally posted by: myocardia
Umm, if his program/game is using up all of his extra RAM, and he has gotten rid of the pagefile/virtual memory, then he won't be running the program at all, at least not for more than a couple of minutes. He'll get to see what Windows does when it runs out of memory, though. Have you read this thread at all, BTW?

I don't recall him saying his plan was to put 100% ram in use so that Windows can't function. And no, I've read absolutely nothing in this thread, this is actually 1 of 50 random responses I felt like typing. WTF?

 

[TanisHalfElven]

Originally posted by: skace
Creating a ram disk just to put your swapfile on it is a ridiculously complex way of not having a swapfile at all (think about what the swapfile is, now think about how silly it is to move the swapfile into physical memory). If he creates a ramdisk, puts his program there and then removes the swapfile completely, he will have his and your benefits combined.

OR
he could keep his 8gb ram, and delete the swap/page file altogether. that way everything goes into RAM.