"Dimmdrive" to be released on Steam tomorrow

[StingBull]

Most of the reviews are negative on Steam but honestly I read some of those reviews and really they are stupid. Most of them blame the program for stuff that's not its fault. I saw one guy blaming the program for not having enough RAM in his machine. Seriously.

[AlwaysFSX]

Everyone that's complaining that it's useless, you can just buy an ssd and get almost the performance, nah.

There's games out there that will benefit from just allocating 4 gigs you already have so you don't have a stuttering game. I've run quite a few things off a ramdisk and the instant loading and saving is nice.

Definitely picking this up when I can.

[Fetzie]

Get 64GB's or 128GB's of ram and put windows on it. That would be epic.

 

You can already do that with current RAMDisk software. It does take a couple of minutes to boot though, as the OS has to be read into RAM before it can boot.

Run Raid 0 with PCIe SSDs, you'd start getting close to RAM speeds-not that you really that much speed currently.

Takes up PCI-E slots though. Most motherboards wouldn't have the slot spacing to do 2x sli/crossfire, 2xPCI-E SSD and a sound-card, for example.

[Humbug]

I can see a few advantages. One of them being for games with very large texture files that need loading. If you have a GPU that doesn't have the memory to accommodate large textures, the program should eliminate framerate tanking, since before the system would have to grab textures from a comparatively sluggish HDD rather than RAM. So in a word it should allow you to enable ultra textures on ANY game, regardless of the limit the game recommends.

isn't the latency from the GPU to system ram too high to be used as pseudo-VRAM?

[toggleguy]

Totally worth it?

$$$$

[rockking1379]

who has 15-20gb free memory to load games into it.

i have 16gb and thats a lot. i dont see anyone other then video editors having the ram that would be needed. 

i dont see this as something to really be used to ramdisk an entire game. but i do see some good uses for programmers, imagine being able to load your entire IDE in a  few seconds as opposed to waiting for everything to load into ram off the disk. put your web browser and a few other absolute critical programs into a ram disk (say 25% of your ram) and it could be very useful

[Django]

I'm stuck at 16GB because Microsoft (the greedy bastards) locks Windows 7 Home premium at 16GB.

FWIW some of the RAMDisks can use windows unmanaged memory. Quite a few people would use this on their 32-bit systems with 4GB RAM where only 3GB or so was used by windows due to the 4GB physical addressing limit giving 1GB or so free for use with a RAMDisk. Same could be done on 64-bit systems for cases where theres more RAM than the Windows OS allows to be used.

[Tam3n]

Some games' loading speed, like Star Citizen, are not even read speed limited in the first place, since the cpu needs to unpack and process assets. This leads to a situation where the hard drive performance, after a certain level, doesn't even matter anymore since you are cpu bound in any case.

[SkilledRebuilds]

I've been using a second SSD for Games storage (D:) and then I point Ramcache (not ramdisk) software at that drive.

 

Seems like it's close to the same thing... my frequently used files on that one drive (Game files) are thrown into a ramcache (a size of my choosing)
http://www.superspeed.com/desktop/supercache.php

Price is too much for most people, I have 2 licenses from the one purchase (Work/Home)

[Nup]

Id love to give this a go... bloody cost of getting the ram though. 

[TheKDub]

I'd have to have like 32GB of ram just to play skyrim with that.