Performance boost using ramdisk as virtual page file

This thread might be better placed elsewhere, and if so please feel free to move it, moderators... it might even have been mentioned before, but I can't recall it.

I use Win 7 x64 and have 8 gigs of RAM. I've been looking for different possible ways of making Arma II access more of this memory. So, I recently used the following free software - http://www.dataram.com/products-and-services/ramdisk/download-ramdisk - to create a 4 gig FAT32 ramdisk and then told Windows to use this ramdisk (default 'D' drive for me) as my paging file (virtual memory). You have to set this paging file each time you fire up your OS, but slow texture pop-ins are pretty much eradicated by this and I find I can crank my settings up about an extra 15% by doing this. I've only really tested the system in SP so far. Note that, if you're running Win 7, you'll have to run the install program in compatibility mode.

I've found the system to be no less stable than without using the ramdisk so far. I find that once Arma II has crashed once, I have to restart my whole OS, otherwise I get strange performance glitches anyway. I don't get any more crashes than usual after having put this in place.

interesting, i only have 2gb ram, and I'm using XP, do you think i could benefit from tryin this ? Another thing you have 8GB of ram and you still get texture pop-ins ? thats weird, i get it to but not very much, are you using the -xp command? i heard that helps with 8GB ram.

If you've got 2 gigs, then it's a fair bet that A2's using all the available memory anyway, and you're doing yourself a big favour by sticking with XP. The problem is that with a 64 bit OS, A2 still only uses a small amount of the system memory (graphic card memory is a different matter). This fix only helps if your HDs are the weakest system component. Arma 2 loads textures for only as long as they are needed, so it's (partly) all that HD accessing that's leading to stutter for a lot of people. A solid state drive is a(n expensive) way to help get round this problem. This is a cheaper way round it (hopefully).

I should think that less than 4 gigs of RAM for the page file would help - mostly Windows tries to set it to about 1.8 if it can, so 4 is probably overkill.

Interesting - anther chap tried something similar (posted in the ArmA2-Mark thread) and reported no increase in performance. He had 6GB DDR3 and used some RAM (3-4GB?) as a virtual disk and copied the bulk of the ArmA2 texture files to the virtual disk. I don't believe he'd transferred his page file to the RAM though.

Thanks for the info - I might have a go too and see if I can notice a performance difference.

Jero.

Interesting - anther chap tried something similar (posted in the ArmA2-Mark thread) and reported no increase in performance. He had 6GB DDR3 and used some RAM (3-4GB?) as a virtual disk and copied the bulk of the ArmA2 texture files to the virtual disk. I don't believe he'd transferred his page file to the RAM though.

Thanks for the info - I might have a go too and see if I can notice a performance difference.

Jero.

That's kinda dumb because most of the stuff on the virtual disk has to be copied to the page file anyway... ON THE HDD!

Hi Richey79 I benchmarked this for you with ArmA II Mark and there is no difference in load time nor cached time my ArmA II Scores are listed below.

Cached Time being the 2nd run of the ArmA II Mark where you see the maps have been cached.

---------------Load Score------Cached Score

RAM DISK------4371.39---------5260.66

No RAM DISK---4379.70---------5260.42

As you can see there is no change in performance. RAM DISK would most likely improve ArmA II performance if you load the full ArmA program into the RAM DISK how ever you would have to wait for it to load the full 8GB of ArmA into the RAM DISK and thus requiring more then 8GB of system RAM. Probably better just to set up a RAID 0 or install a SDD.

Thanks, Scorpio9.

Interesting. You've convinced me to go get another 6GB RAM and install ArmA2 entirely on a virtual disk :D (just kidding!)

Jero.

Hi Richey79 I benchmarked this for you with ArmA II Mark and there is no difference in load time nor cached time my ArmA II Scores are listed below.

Cached Time being the 2nd run of the ArmA II Mark where you see the maps have been cached.

---------------Load Score------Cached Score

RAM DISK------4371.39---------5260.66

No RAM DISK---4379.70---------5260.42

As you can see there is no change in performance. RAM DISK would most likely improve ArmA II performance if you load the full ArmA program into the RAM DISK how ever you would have to wait for it to load the full 8GB of ArmA into the RAM DISK and thus requiring more then 8GB of system RAM. Probably better just to set up a RAID 0 or install a SDD.

You are right, only if u load whole game into ramdisk you will gain something.

Why dont u try to install the demo into ramdrive, and see what u get. I would do that but i only have 4GB, and im not into upgrading my c2d sys....i wil wait for 32nm xeons, and 24GB of RAM.

Ram never was cheaper http://www.pricewatch.com/browse/system_memory/ddr3-1333_4gb

Putting your pagefile on a RAM disk is daft, just specify no pagefile and cut out the middleware.

I dont see even i theory why should u have any boost, becouse win32 kernel does not use swap file (virtual memmory) for application if it has enough of RAM to allocate.

I don't see the point in putting windows swap file in ram disk, however putting some of the addons in a ramdisk might be a good idea. If you for example have all the armored vehicles in a ram disk you can in theory put everything graphic related to this on max.

Thanks for the bench-marking Zaira - I'm never thorough enough to do such a thing myself.

I'm not disagreeing that there's any logical explanation why, or suggesting that this 'fix' may help people in most situations. However, after more testing, I do find that for my system this tends to alleviate the annoying phenomenon of bushes etc. remaining low texture until you move very close to them, and I'm finding my game experience smoother.

I can only suggest that these subjective findings are down to my using an AMD processor, or its relatively low speed --> currently I'm using a Phenom quad @ 2.4 with cross-fired HD4870s. A mismatch and bottle-neck, I realise: I'm in the process of significantly upgrading my processor.

Perhaps that's the reason for my perceived improvements?

Cheers for your work, anyway.

yup amd phenom are an epic failure. even phenom2 isn't exactly as powerfull as intel core2 quad.

Wow zaira I didnt even relize pricewatch.com was still around lol. I used to use them all the time untill i discovered Newegg.

I only have 6 GB at the moment plus the program Richey79 suggested only allows a 4GB RAMDISK and as we know we need 8 gigs to load ArmA II. Using the a RAMDISK as a paging file will not achieve what we are looking for It would work quit nicely Im sure to load ArmA II into a RAMDISK but who wants to wait for the 8 gigs to copy on the RAM disk lol... however it would be a cool experiment. But in reality its much more simple to set up a RAID 0 and if you really want some spunk installing a SDD would surely solve the stutter issues plus make windows pop like crazy when you went to load something... like I said i believe soon windows performance issues will become transparent to us again just as XP did just keep upgrading your Rigs. Its like in the old days, and now Im really dating myself... lol we used to program in the low level language assembly because it was super fast and more efficient used less memory but required great attention to detail and was really difficult to debug. Shortly after we got past the 4K of ram we started using high-level languages such as Basic, Pascale and then to faster high-level languages like C, C++ to current more verbose languages that we use today that are much easier to use and understand and the penalty that we pay to run them as opposed to assembly becomes transparent to us due to CPU power.

RAMDISK were cool and had a place back when we used floppy's slow MFM and RLL hard drives. But its pretty much been replaced with the L1 and L2 cache and lots of RAM and with 64-bit OS's more ram then you can pile on your plate just think our CPU's have more memory on them then my first HDD which was just a mere 5MB. Keep your day job we will be playing the upgrade game for the rest of our lives.

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