Ramdrive Games

[Quit Tessa]

How about offering the option to store and run games from a ramdrive?
Games can be kept in a compressed Harddrive image file and loaded into Ram upon game launch for faster access and load times etc.
When games are updated the image can be loaded on the fly as direct access without having to load the whole image into ram to allow updates to be downloaded / written immediately.
While the game is running in Ramdrive a seperate file can be created to cache data to be written to the image ie: Saves etc, in case of power failure.
All this would allow game to take up less space on Hard Drives, take less time for initial installation downloads reducing network cost overheads, reduce game file fragmentation as the whole game would be a single file, and reduce in-game load times.

ImDisk Virtual Disk Driver by LTR-Data is an excellent example of what can be done.

[Heke]

Brilliant idea! Here have my support for this.

[Player1]

i dont really see a reason for this couse then you would have all loading time when the game starts up first...

most 64bit games make use of the whole ram anyways... usually the ram/vram is used for storing/caching data like this.... and old games run fast anyways

[Quit Tessa]

Trust me the difference it makes when games have to load lots of small files is immense. Most mechanical drives stuggle to read lots of small files which can lead to stuttering in-game when these are loaded on-the-fly like in most mmorpg's and lage open-world games.
Plus most games (over 99.9%) are not 64-bit anyway which is why all games that have large worlds have to stream load on-the-fly.
It also doesn't take very long to load a Ramdrive image as it's a single large file which allows for fast sequential reads (mechanical drive do this just fine) of over 100MB/s allowing a 8GB (v-large game) to load in about a minute, which you'll more than save during in-game loads and stutter reduction.
Plus with the games being compressed into the image files reducing the space they take up on drive as well (which also reduces the time taked to load 'em into Ram).
I'll admit not all games would benefit from being run from a Ramdrive but those types listed above and most FPS & Racing games would benefit quite significantly.

[sköldpadda]

You can already do this manually, there is no need to add support for it in the Steam client itself. Mirror selected content to your SSD/HDD, like save games, settings etc, and have the rest compressed on your SSD/HDD and decompress it upon start of Windows after the RAM-drive is created.

However,
The loading times depends on more than pure read speed or access times, it depends on how the game loads the files, many games are still loading games file by file instead of letting the system decide the concurrent amount of files loading. So yea, the gains from a RAM-drive depends highly on the application installed on it.

But who is still using mechanical disks these days?
RAM-drives was hot when we used HDD's, but now when you can build a computer with SSD's only it's not so hot anymore. If you use SSD's you're better off using that RAM to disable the pagefile instead.

[Quit Tessa]

And where can you get an SSD that's 4TB in size for £130/$150 or less?
Also my pagefile is disabled, I have 24GB of ram and already use the aforementioned ImDisk Ramdrive but it's a ruddy pain to have to manually mirror directories every time I want to load a game.

[Player1]

If you would benchmark how long it takes to copy files to the ramdrive and add this to the general loading time you would see its no performance gain. game devs already take care of your ram, if the game is not 64bit but your o/s is, filesystem cache makes use of the avaialbe ram.

If you have enough RAM, optimize your filesystem cache. Running windows you can for example try "fsutil behavior set memoryusage 2" to increase the fs cache. There are plenty of docs at microsoft.com or your operating system webpage for filesystem tuning....

Also i really need to mention disabling the pagefile is NOT RECOMMENDED, no matter how much RAM you have installed. If you know how it works and what its actually for you would have not disabled it, you wont loose performance when enabling it.

[Quit Tessa]

I've tried increasing the FS cache and it's useless on mmorpg's.
I play Final Fantasy XIV: ARR, and when in towns the game stutters while it loads all the characters and npc's when running of the HD even with big cache's. When running off the Ramdrive it's smooth as silk.
As I said in the first post it's not all about load times, it's about the in-game effects and also the ability to reduce the size of games on the drive as well.
I'd just like to see Steam have the option for users to select to install to a Ramdrive Image and auto-mount and dismount them upon selection for those of us that have the Ram available to make best use of them.