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Store a game to RAM?
- Thread starter cxz001
- Start date
Joe Average
Ad Blocker - Banned
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- Apr 6, 2008
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That would be RAMdisk software, which can take some of your system RAM and using a special device driver turn that portion of RAM into something the operating system "sees" as a physical drive. The obvious benefit: insanely fast access speeds that no hard drives or even Solid-State-Drives can even come close to these days. With high end DDR3 triple channel RAM, you could be looking at read and write speeds in excess of 14GB/s - yes, that's 14 gigabytes per second - which makes hard drives in the 100-150MB/s and even fast SSDs cranking out 500MB/s look pretty damned slow.
The biggest downside to using RAMdisks is you do need quite a bit of "spare" RAM to make it work efficiently. As most games these days tend to be quite large in terms of how much disk space they require when you install them, unless you've got several gigs of RAM to spare you may not find it feasible to try and use a RAMdisk for such purposes.
A game like Quake 3 with a complete installation and a lot of extra maps/models might run several hundred megabytes, which was easy to fit into a RAMdisk years ago for me when I was a hardcore player. I'd have 2GB in a machine, set up a 1GB RAMdisk, copy the entire Quake 3 directory (about 691MB in size) to the RAMdisk and run the entire game from RAM - levels loaded in like 1 second flat, and I was always the first person on a map, sometimes by several seconds which gave me an advantage that I exploited whenever possible.
Today's games are fairly huge but you might still be able to make use of a RAMdisk for caching purposes, just takes some time and effort.
Best RAMdisk software in my opinion: SuperSpeed.com's RamDisk Plus but it's a commercial product (and note I'm talking about RamDisk Plus, not the basic RamDisk software - there's two versions, and RamDisk Plus has more capabilities and options).
The next one I'd recommend is DataRAM RAMDisk but it's limited to a 4GB RAMdisk with the free product - if you pay the $14.99 registration fee (worth every cent) you'll then be able to create RAMdisks of any size you want given you have that much RAM to spare.
RAMdisks can make any machine more efficient, it just takes the software, the RAM, and some time to get things configured correctly but the benefits pay for themselves quickly.
The biggest downside to using RAMdisks is you do need quite a bit of "spare" RAM to make it work efficiently. As most games these days tend to be quite large in terms of how much disk space they require when you install them, unless you've got several gigs of RAM to spare you may not find it feasible to try and use a RAMdisk for such purposes.
A game like Quake 3 with a complete installation and a lot of extra maps/models might run several hundred megabytes, which was easy to fit into a RAMdisk years ago for me when I was a hardcore player. I'd have 2GB in a machine, set up a 1GB RAMdisk, copy the entire Quake 3 directory (about 691MB in size) to the RAMdisk and run the entire game from RAM - levels loaded in like 1 second flat, and I was always the first person on a map, sometimes by several seconds which gave me an advantage that I exploited whenever possible.
Today's games are fairly huge but you might still be able to make use of a RAMdisk for caching purposes, just takes some time and effort.
Best RAMdisk software in my opinion: SuperSpeed.com's RamDisk Plus but it's a commercial product (and note I'm talking about RamDisk Plus, not the basic RamDisk software - there's two versions, and RamDisk Plus has more capabilities and options).
The next one I'd recommend is DataRAM RAMDisk but it's limited to a 4GB RAMdisk with the free product - if you pay the $14.99 registration fee (worth every cent) you'll then be able to create RAMdisks of any size you want given you have that much RAM to spare.
RAMdisks can make any machine more efficient, it just takes the software, the RAM, and some time to get things configured correctly but the benefits pay for themselves quickly.
Today's games are fairly huge but you might still be able to make use of a RAMdisk for caching purposes, just takes some time and effort.
Since Vista/Win7 support file symlinks, you can go that route and put the larger files on the RAM disk.
This SU question has a few more suggestions, including a link to an old benchmark at Raymond.cc.