[v8440]

Hi all,

I recently tripled the amount of ram my system has, to 1.5 gig. I want to try running a game like medal of honor entirely in ram. To do that, I have to actually install the game into the ramdrive, right? Or, is there a way to make my existing normal installation run in the ramdrive?

As you might suspect, I've never messed with a ramdrive before. Sure is nice playing doom 3 for a hour and not having to wait for all the desktop icons to load back into memory after quitting the game! Doom 3 blew just about eveything else out of system memory when it had 512.

[flapperhead]

i heard of guys doing it but it wont help too much.. ur framerates and stuff are determined by ur vid card cpu etc.., and u have plenty of ram so u wont have to do much drive swapping.

[Boomstick]

Originally Posted by flapperhead

i heard of guys doing it but it wont help too much.. ur framerates and stuff are determined by ur vid card cpu etc.., and u have plenty of ram so u wont have to do much drive swapping.

You've never had to load a map in Battlefield

[ResponsiblAdult]

what does that mean?

[JamminPotato]

bf:v is a hdd pig. it uses lots of hdd space

[flapperhead]

Originally Posted by ResponsiblAdult

what does that mean?

lol...(i didnt know what it was either till i started playing doom and unreal) thats means he wont have to wait while a map (maze) loads in his games. all of these deathmatches and killergames revolve around a map or outside enviroment where all the killing happens...

[ResponsiblAdult]

OMG I'm such an idiot, LOL, thanks flappa, I get it

[Boomstick]

When battlefield switches maps, I can go get a drink, take a bio break, and still come back to the loading screen

[ResponsiblAdult]

Yup, same here when loading some MoH maps back in the day......

[johan851]

Loading a game to the RAM drive would also be a bit of a mess. It might not work correctly because of the change in drive letter, or the registry might not be too happy about it. You'd also have to load the entire game from your HDD to the RAM drive (2gigs for Battlefield: Vietnam) which would take some time in itself. And if you have a 1gig RAM drive, that leaves 512mb for the game to run in. So...unless you've got like 4 gigs of RAM...it's not worth it.

[Electron Chaser]

The last time I ran a program from a RAMDrive I think I was running DOS 5.0. LOL

[microfire]

Wouldn't performance decrease? I mean whenever the cpu wants some game data from the ram drive, it will be sharing the same ram for entire everything, thus accessing it in two different places, could cause slow downs, conflicts or even crashs and lock up?

Im sure ram drives are way to flakey to be reliable.

[johan851]

Wouldn't performance decrease? I mean whenever the cpu wants some game data from the ram drive, it will be sharing the same ram for entire everything, thus accessing it in two different places, could cause slow downs, conflicts or even crashs and lock up?

Im sure ram drives are way to flakey to be reliable.

Keep in mind that the RAM is infinitely (well...you know) faster than the hard drive. As far as pure bandwidth, you get maybe 50mb/s read from a Raptor and at least 3.2GB/s (3.5+ in an overclocked AMD rig) from the RAM. Seek times are a whole different story, and a solid state drive is MUCH faster at finding data than an actuator arm in a hard drive.

Your RAM is always being accessed in multiple places. It happens when your computer boots up as your OS is accessed, a antivirus program is accessed, etc. Ever seen all the processes in the task manager? Each one of those is in a different location on the RAM and is accessed simultaneously. That's 20 or so little applications right there. I sure hope my PC can do more than one thing at a time...

There's nothing flaky about RAM either, other than the fact that it wipes itself clean when powered off.

[microfire]

My ram(when just 1gb of mushkin 3500lv2 in machine) is more than 3600mb/s unbuffered. If I bench test a ram drive, its about 1200mb/s. Fat32 ram drive is slight faster than a NTFS ram drive.

[johan851]

If I bench test a ram drive, its about 1200mb/s.

That's a hard drive benchmark on RAM. It's like using a 400m running track to bench a BMW.

And that's STILL 50mb/s with a Raptor vs. 1200mb/s with the RAM.

[Albuquerque]

I use a ramdrive on my server machine for hosting my TradeWars 2003 server (old BBS-style text-based telnet game) That machine has 256mb of ram, and I only need like a 64mb ramdrive to hold both universes and all the player data. It is actually a very obvious speed upgrade on that machine, since the stock drive is an 8gb Western Digital 5400RPM drive with like 256k in cache

Tradewars has a bad habit of seeking the drive too often; somehow even Windows XP's disk caching system doesn't even stop it. Throw it in a ramdrive, and the player gets a very noticeable speedup when rapidly changing sectors or probing. The box is a Pentium 233MMX

[microfire]

I might have another go at this, im having trouble parting with 2gb of my ram to go back to 1gb ram.
1gb = bigger overclock plus low latency - powerful
2gb = smaller overclock higher latency - more responsive(im sure of it), never run of memory.

Was overclocking the 4x512 modules to high. Found a good reliable speed now with multiple long runs of prime96.
Yea I know alot slower than 1gb but with more ram im certain overall things are faster due to less disk cache. I play alot of UT04, for sure makes a difference here on max detail, no disking, can alt-tab to desktop and other stuff without closing my game in progress.
Again im gonna have another shot at making 768mb ram drive and moving my swapfile to it. Leave the remaining 1280mb free for everything else. This should be a nice balance for this day and age.