Ram Drives revisited

[QuantumSingularity]

So guys, after all the fuss about the PS5's SSD, i started wondering if load times really would reduce drastically or as Sony marketed it themselves "be gone completely"? So i recalled an old LTT video about ram drives and started searching the net, but everything i found was way too old in CPU architecture and RAM speeds as well (most well beyond 4 years). Are there any tests of ramdrives with high-speed memory (3600MHZ+) and modern CPU/GPUs?Let's say you have a Gigabyte X570 Aorus Extreme, 3950X an RTX2080Ti and 4x32GB of Corsair's 4600MHz CL18 Vengeance kit (you're baller, balling the overkill to the max). Would a ramdrive in that config significantly reduce the load times in games OR are we already hitting software limitations with the game engines or somewhere else? We know DDR4 @ 3200MHz has a transfer rate of 25.6 GB/s so in theory the loading times should be cut down significantly for anything installed on such ramdrive and not on SSD.. I know the whole "ram is volatile" concept and losing data on powerlos, but just for the sake of test i'm interesting in the numbers?. So is there such a test done yet, if not maybe there's an enthusiast amongs us who would like to test that?

 

P.S

And yes i know the whole idea there (PS5's SSD) revises not only around transfer speeds, but just for the sake of the tests stick to the question..

[Kilrah]

Watch their SSD blind test, even SATA vs NVMe SSD basically won't show a noticeable difference in load times, so a RAM disk pretty certainly won't either.

 

The PS5 is supposed to get its advantage from their "storage processor" thing and carefully optimized game data layout for which there's no equivalent on PC, so no way to directly compare. 

[WereCatf]

18 minutes ago, QuantumSingularity said:

So guys, after all the fuss about the PS5's SSD, i started wondering if load times really would reduce drastically or as Sony marketed it themselves "be gone completely"? So i recalled an old LTT video about ram drives

Comparing apples and oranges. On PCs, the decompression of the data is handled by the CPU, which is one big aspect that slows games down. The second is the duplication of assets. Not to mention the fact that when a game has been designed for such a fast flash-storage, it doesn't need to cache everything in RAM in the first place, whereas PC-games do.

 

You can't do a comparison like this and have it actually mean anything. How a game has been designed to make use of the underlying storage matters, not just the raw bandwidth of it.

[QuantumSingularity]

Yes, i understand all of that. I know there's a bit of an apples to oranges comparison right here going on. And no, i'm not trying too sh*t over the PS5 just out of pure PCMR spite - if it works, it's good news for us as well, since the PC would get even better at gaming. I bet it wouldn't take some major manufacturer more than a year to reverse engineer it and put it into production. I've read everything about the new controller and so on, BUT when you dive deep down, under all of the supposedly new tech (which i admit on theory sounds really amazing) a pattern starts to emerge - the one thing that seems to be of the most importance is the raw transfer speed since now the memory is supposed to store only 1 second of gameplay, relying on low latency and high bandwidth for the constant flow of packages. Correct me if i'm wrong, but they'll rely mostly on the game devs designing their games around that architecture, something which i think is a really big risk since we know how "well" we've assimilated multithreaded gaming experience so far. 

And on about the test again. My idea (which i obviously didn't explain well enough) is also to test if the low latency RAM provides can result in a better score. In terms of response times NVMe is about the same as DDR2. So surely there must be some improvements to be had, don't you think?

[WereCatf]

5 minutes ago, QuantumSingularity said:

the one thing that seems to be of the most importance is the raw transfer speed

No. That "one thing" would be game-devs designing their games to take advantage of fast storage. We already have plenty of fast storage, but on PC, game-devs have to target the lowest common denominator, which is spinning rust. Even with the not-so-fast NVMe-drives, we could have much faster load-times and not have to make do with all the various game-design elements that are intended to hide background-loading, if games were designed to make use of them.

 

9 minutes ago, QuantumSingularity said:

So surely there must be some improvements to be had, don't you think?

Only minimal, because of all the things I've already said several times. It doesn't matter if you use the world's fastest RAM as a RAM-drive or a bog-standard SATA SSD, if the game has been designed for spinning rust, because the bottleneck isn't the storage anymore. This is why there is very little difference when moving from a regular SATA SSD to NVMe.

[Kilrah]

27 minutes ago, QuantumSingularity said:

Correct me if i'm wrong, but they'll rely mostly on the game devs designing their games around that architecture, something which i think is a really big risk since we know how "well" we've assimilated multithreaded gaming experience so far. 

Well console games have always been well optimized for that hardware since there's only one to optimize for, so no problem there.

But that's the whole reason why this approach has no chance to find its way into PCs soon.

[QuantumSingularity]

42 minutes ago, WereCatf said:

Only minimal, because of all the things I've already said several times. 

Even if it is minimal the question is, is it visibly measurable. And if so, which kind of games can take advantage of that. Back when DDR3 was first making its' way i remember installing Lineage 2 on ram disk, so i can have a faster loading in sieges and it really helped a lot (the difference was like night and day). I know it's an ancient game and games have progressed a lot since then, but is there any engine out there that can adapt to faster storage? MMORPGs are usually the type of games that best take advantage of faster storage. I would've done the test myself once my hardware arrives, but 32Gigs isn't nearly enough to install any modern game and win 10 on it.

 

27 minutes ago, Kilrah said:

Well console games have always been well optimized for that hardware since there's only one to optimize for, so no problem there.

But that's the whole reason why this approach has no chance to find its way into PCs soon.

I don't even wanna start on that topic, cos it gets out of hand quite easily, but i get your point.