Ramdisk to remove load times completely!!

I think it's not really needed, because:

- if you have 8 GB Ram or more in your computer you have no problem running this game or loading it in acceptable time,
(assuming you're not Ram Nutz, attaching 8 GB ram to single core laptop with Intel Onboard Graphics...)

-You don't want to waste time over slight change in loading time (a lot do, a lot to copy to ram).


Nonetheless, it's good idea

"

really high quality photoshop(or whatever other program you use) painting can take up quite a lot.

-> You mean like 300 DPI A2 or What ?

"

Macronne wrote:

I think it's not really needed, because:


-You don't want to waste time over slight change in loading time (a lot do, a lot to copy to ram).

Its not a SLIGHT change, its a MASSIVE change. 90% reduced load times. you see the zone change screen for a flicker of a second instead of 3-8 seconds (which aren't really a problem)

the point of this is the zones take away from the fluidity of an open world. but when the load times on these are improved so DRASTICALLY that you don't notice them, its a cool effect.

just because you have 8gigs of ram doesn't mean your HD speed is gona be SUPER fast.. standard hd's have been at 7200rpm for the longest time now, they arent gona get any faster just like cars aren't gona get much faster. a standard hd reads at 80mb/s a ramdisk partition reads at 3000mb/s average. idk where you get Slight change from.


Really once you set it up there isn't much you need to manually do anymore. you can setup ramdisk to auto load the files on boot. only thing you need to do is the symlink which can be done in a bat file and require a simple double click. On linux you can have it all done via startup script and all u gota do is type a tiny script startup command when u want to play.

4.2 gigs is alot to load i guess ya but the game is going to load parts of it into ram from ur HD anyways. a ramdisk just does it early and gets load times out of the way for the gameplay.

After open beta and beyond I expect the game folder size to increase to 6g+ and then this wont be a viable solution to increasing load speeds unless you can load it all and maintain 4gigs of free ram. Thus SSD's will be the only solution to decreasing load times.

Just thot i'd let everyone know. because if theres anything d2 has on this game its load times to zone changes. D2 also had alot less data to load though... but with this method it makes zone changes almost seemless.

Anybody remember the difference between d2 loading from cd and d2 with a NO-CD crack? imagine loading it from RAM instead of HD.

It always perplexes me why ram disk frequently offers such drastic performance boosts.

Windows is supposed to be utilizing unused ram for caching on-disc data.
If it were doing so, the benefits of using a ram disk should be negligible.

Dataram's ramdisk has an option to create a backup image everytime it's shutdown and reopen it once it's relaunched, making it less of hassle.

Does an OK job if you can't spare an SSD.

"

anubite wrote:

If you have over 8 GB of memory you're a nut in the first place! No OS or program in existence can make use of that. Can you even use it to store loaded information with something like ramdisk? That'd be the only practical use for memory over 8 GB.

is this post 10 years old?

its not hard to reach more than 8GB usage if you do some editing with your PC... doesnt really matter if its audio, video or something similar to flash...
Welcome to 2012

"

TJJ wrote:

It always perplexes me why ram disk frequently offers such drastic performance boosts.

Windows is supposed to be utilizing unused ram for caching on-disc data.
If it were doing so, the benefits of using a ram disk should be negligible.

Oh how I wish that were the case.
The OS page cache is a tricky place. Everyone wants to dip their fingers into "unused" memory since there's no contracts that need to be upheld.

A RAMdisk makes it clear to the system that you are explicitly using the memory for caching and not to evict that memory until you say you're done, which is a well understood place.

"

Joel_GGG wrote:

With a ramdisk files still need to be copied to it from the hard drive after each boot right?

Yes, this is why I said an SSD avoids a "cold start", whereas a RAMdisk has to pull Xgb into memory from a spinny disk.

EDIT:

"

XDementia wrote:

Dataram's ramdisk has an option to create a backup image everytime it's shutdown and reopen it once it's relaunched, making it less of hassle.

Yes, but planned shutdowns are an exception. :P That being said, sequential disk write on shutdown means sequential disk read on startup, and if a spinny disk is reading/writing sequentially it's fast as fuck.

"

Joel_GGG wrote:

With a ramdisk files still need to be copied to it from the hard drive after each boot right?

I just bought an SSD, makes a world of difference. Might not be as fast as a ram disk, but it's still pretty damned fast.

Ya they do need to be coppied! SSD's are a more practical solution to load times, especially if you put a few together in raid 0, combines capacity and speed!

But your right RamDisk is still much faster... however with SSD's copying at boot is also MUCH faster :D

"

Joel_GGG wrote:

With a ramdisk files still need to be copied to it from the hard drive after each boot right?

I just bought an SSD, makes a world of difference. Might not be as fast as a ram disk, but it's still pretty damned fast.

Which SSD did you get and how would you say it performs compared to the price? I've been meaning to get some SSDs (One for dedicated OS, one for games), but the price has put me off a little bit, since i just spent a bunch on an i5 3570k, GTX 570 and Sabertooth Z77

To go off topic a bit, you also need alot of ram if you're running firefox. The memory leak still hasnt been fixed. I tried not restarting it as an experiment, 2 weeks later it took over 2gb of ram. :(