RAMDisk Capability :: Suggestions / Ideas

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mekkanyx Oct 24, 2012 @ 6:13am

RAMDisk Capability

I have used Steam since it came out and with the move to SSD, having all my games stored on the main drive became impossible, so I use a SATAIII external drive to hold them. Most games play flawlessly, however some with cutscenes in the middle of play, like Assassins Creed freeze for a few seconds when the cutscene comes in and then you return to play having skipped it. Could Steam implement a RAMDisk for machines that have enough memory such that when a game is loaded, users have the option to load the entire game into memory before playing? This would negate loading screens and all local lag. Thanks.

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Showing 1-11 of 11 comments

Sora Oct 24, 2012 @ 10:36am

First up steams been around since 2005 I believe and your account is from 2010. So that is not very accurate. Also, RAM disks are discontinued under windows 7. With that I highly doubt windows 8 will incorperate any style of RAM disks.

and why in hell would you want to mount an entire game into ram? I could see mounting particular files to speed up access time such as map files and textures IF you have the RAM to spare but other wise this idea is very bad. The only users who could use such a feature unless valve codes the driver for this would be Linux, and MAC users, and windows XP and lower. Vista I dont even know because I skipped that OS. You would essentially have two copies of the game installed just to play it? Not to mention you would LOSE ALL the data & progress after shuting down the system, PLUS you would receive OOME for trying to play or even run multiple programs under that enviroment.

Now. I am sure you could use mklink or symlinks to trick the game into reading data from a small ram disk, for textures, videos, models. which would be a better -idea- than mounting the entire game into ram.

For your assassin creed movie issue. The game plays perfectly fine for me and my friends. So that -might- be your setup. esspecially since you mentioned using an external hdd.

Last edited by Sora; Oct 24, 2012 @ 10:37am

Satoru Oct 24, 2012 @ 12:47pm

Note a efw things

1) Some games may benefit from decreased load times, other will not
2) performance gains will be zero
3) in-game performance only benefit is for games like AC which stream game assets directly to you while playing. ssd would reduce stuttering during those streaming times but that's it

Any load time benefits would be obliterated by having to load the entire game inot ramdisk in the first place

If you want join the Steam Client beta. certain games can now be installed anywhere, and you can choose to install specific games you feel 'might' benefit from being on an ssd. note that these benefits are generally extremely modest. TF2 is not going to load instantaneously.

mekkanyx Oct 24, 2012 @ 3:21pm

I appreciate the snyde comments, and I had an older account that was lost on a different email circa the Half Life era. Also, I did not say Steam would "make a RAMDisk" and RAMDisk are still VERY commonly used for many tasks. While they are not natively incorporated, several are available. Nothing would ever be lost unless the system crashed and save games and such would still go to hard disk. My setup is not the problem, seeing as my external drive is faster than most internal drives (theoretical & tested).

I have tested games with RAMDisks (WoW, D3, Steam games installed individually into RAM and then swapped out local content that was stored on the external drive). This is easily done by installing the game to a RAMDisk so the registry is updated to point there, then copying the content to a hard drive folder and back again when you want to play it.

1) EVERY SINGLE GAME benefits greatly, no exceptions.
2) Performance gains with respect to video will not be increased, however that is not the point. Performance with loading textures and levels/maps is increased quite a lot.
3) AC is not the only game that benefits from it. Try any game that has discrete levels or even wide maps like WoW that loads at certain points - esp in real-time like Saints Row - and they all experience serious gains.

I do not want Steam to make a simple RAMDisk utility. I want the option to have the game locally installed, and then upon launching, instead of just loading the "need-it-now" data to RAM, load the whole game into RAM and play from there.

As for the whole "OOME" stuff, I HIGHLY doubt anything could fill up my machine's memory, seeing as I won't be doing a whole lot of other things while playing and I can load WoW into memory and play it fine alongside browsers etc.

mekkanyx Oct 24, 2012 @ 4:22pm

Also, after a little searching, the Assassin's Creed "lag" is due to the Ubisoft Montreal servers being slow or the connection to them being bad. It said to go offline in Steam and turn off router / modem, but its not necessary, as just disabling the active ethernet adapter solves this issue perfectly. I knew it couldn't be the external drive. No issues after disconnecting even at max resolution and max settings, however I would still like to be able to load a full game into RAM before playing so that all loading is instant(ish - depending on your RAM speed/quality) and does not take away from the atmosphere of the game.

Last edited by mekkanyx; Oct 24, 2012 @ 4:48pm

F. Noogui Jan 15, 2013 @ 9:58am

534n: Did you turn up any good solution?

osullytony Jan 15, 2013 @ 10:02am

no.

mekkanyx Jan 23, 2013 @ 1:17pm

The solution I used (for games with longer loading times or frequent loads) was to just create a regular RAMDisk, and then load a steamapps folder with only that game installed into the RAMDisk and run steam from it. One of the great things about steam is nothing is set in stone. Steam doesn't care what your current setup is as long as it can find what it needs to do what you want. All the save games go to the same place regardless, and if you only want to play one game, then you only need to accomodate for that. I understand now though that it would be an unwise expense of time for them to make their own memory loading for games when not many of them need it, however I have found it beneficial for games that load frequently and have the habit of interrupting seamless gameplay just by setting it up myself.

淫神 Nafryti Jan 23, 2013 @ 2:14pm

AMD offers a free 6 Gig RAMdisk with the AMD branded RAM by Patriot, AMD has made RAMdisk a bit easier to set up, i remember there was another method that involved using ISO's and another involving RAR's but both were quite difficult and highly unstable.