Ramdisk to remove load times completely!!

I made some progress, still not 100%.

I'm using the Link Shell Extension mentioned here:
http://www.gameskyrim.com/howto-ramdisk-symlink-t224952.html

Process Monitor no longer reports the game trying to access the SDD drive for files, however I still get a lot of PATH NOT FOUND messages on my Ramdisk.

http://postimage.org/image/s0d0kv1u3/full/

Fresh game installation.

I'm determined to explore this as much as I can.

CrystalDiskMark for SDD and ramdisk. I took this with other stuff open, including the game, just to verify the rough speeds are what I'd expect.

http://postimage.org/image/lgj1xmq03/full/

Edit:
Here's a better one I took after booting the system with no apps running:
http://postimage.org/image/bot70tjwf/
Bottom left my SSD, bottom right the ramdisk.

GPU usage stats via GPU-Z and are from alt tabbing into the game and loading 3 different areas.

What else affects area loading times beside the drive speed? Seeing as how the Ramdisk is an order of magnitude faster than the SDD, I'd expect that the ramdisk would barely bottleneck the loading times. What else? CPU doesn't hit 100% on any of the cores while loading either. I just fail to see where the bottleneck is.


System specs:
i5-750 @ 3.4ghz
Radeon 5670
12G DDR3 1200mhz, 5g ramdisk
Crucial m4 SSD on SATA2
MSI P55-CD53


Ramdisk is NTFS, seeing as the game has files > 4gb and I can't use FAT32 for it.


Resource monitor still reports a lot of PATH NOT FOUNDs, but that doesn't seem to affect the game as far as I can tell. I could reinstall the game on SDD and see if I still get those. Alternatively I could install the game directly onto the Ramdisk and see if it helps any.

Oh btw, the game stores files such as the minimap on C:\Users\username\Documents\My Games\Path of Exile, which I've also symlinked to my Ramdisk.


Any input is appreciated.

Does having SSD/Ramdisk reach the same speeds as having HDD/Ramdisk?

I have always thought about upgrading from 8GB > 12GB ram but never saw the point in it really. The file size for PoE is getting pretty huge (like 5.4GB on mine now).
Also I forget, but whats the best way to know if you are about to overclock your pc/laptop?

Metronomy - the only thing that matters is the drive your game is installed on.



Ramdisk is fast enough to be negligible in loading times. I suspect SSD does almost as well.

Click for full version


According to process monitor, while loading an area, for ~5.2 seconds the only detectable thing that the process does is TCP sends and receives. Unless there's something here that I'm missing, it seems that the network is the bottle neck to reduce loading times after having SSD / Ramdisk. I connect to European gateway and have latency in the 85-100 ms area.

My system specs are posted in previous post. If the bottleneck is CPU / GPU then I've been unable to detect it. Most stressed CPU cores hoover around 50-60% while loading. While I can't rule out GPU being the bottleneck, I load zones at roughly same speed playing in 1920x1080 as I do playing fullscreen or windowed at 800x600 (which may or may not be an indicator that GPU isn't bottleneck). Everything on lowest setting / off as I mentioned, FPS around 90-100.


If the bottleneck is indeed the network as I suspect, then I'd love to get a response from GGG on the matter. Perhaps this part can be optimized?

Good.. I am also agree with you... I think Long path tools is more helpful for you.. So, use it and solve your problem.. Thank you....

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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.

when doing 8x4.5 meter 144dpi billboards with 50mpx photos in photoshop I can use up 20GB with ease. Every x64 OS with x64 native coded application can allocate as much RAM as you have if the need arises ;)

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Metronomy wrote:

Does having SSD/Ramdisk reach the same speeds as having HDD/Ramdisk?

its two different sides - with a ramdisk you have to preload the game (or whatever you want to run) everytime after booting (and you lost all changes, like updates or even logfiles if you dont copy them back); for an SSD its not that good to have lots of write cycles to it (logfile).

Ramdisk should be slightly faster, but I'm unsure how neccessary this is. Only advantage of combining SSD + ramdisk, would be that you can avoid most of the writing to the drive, and that the copy process while preparing the ramdisk is way faster than from conventional hd.

"

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.

High quality video editors like Premiere definitely make use of more than 8gb of ram. While I "only" run 16 there is some benefit to going all the way to 32. When you're already spending an extra $600 on cpu/mobo for your specialized build, adding that ram is nothing.

I have a question.
Can you make a ramdisk for this game with only 8gb of ram, on vista 32-bit? since it only recognizes 3-4gb of my ram anyways, could i change the other 4-5gb of my ram to a ramdisk for games?

"

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

With the right ram disk software, in fact, no. You can configure the SW to sync to disk. Just don't expect wonders if you lose power without that sync.

--C