Vram as storage for retro games

[Tbone3366]

I have some RX580 8GB and a 1060 6GB and I was curious if it was possible to use the vram for my older N64 games and ps1 games that I can rip from the actual media and use in emulators

[aDoomGuy]

......why..?

 

I know you can use RAM cache I think it's called to use RAM as storage ...but I don't think you can do it with VRAM...

[gabrielcarvfer]

3 minutes ago, Tbone3366 said:

I have some RX580 8GB and a 1060 6GB and I was curious if it was possible to use the vram for my older N64 games and ps1 games that I can rip from the actual media and use in emulators

As storage? But this memory is volatile. Your emulator could still use it as cache, but the latency is worse than main memory, so it wouldn't make much sense.

[Tbone3366]

6 minutes ago, Tbone3366 said:

I have some RX580 8GB and a 1060 6GB and I was curious if it was possible to use the vram for my older N64 games and ps1 games that I can rip from the actual media and use in emulators

 

 

I saw something about it online I thought linus did that with the 3090 and crysis but I don't remember, I'm just bored rn with covid and waiting on our lockdown to end 

[Letgomyleghoe]

4 minutes ago, gabrielcarvfer said:

Your emulator could still use it as cache, but the latency is worse than main memory

the latency would be worse, but it would still be faster as storage media due to raw bandwidth.

[Slayer3032]

Tomshardware seems to have done it with Crysis 3.

 

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/crysis-3-vram-disk-benchmarks

https://github.com/prsyahmi/GpuRamDrive

[mariushm]

You can make a regular ram drive with various free programs (i personally use imdisk ram drive) and it will be faster than using ram on the video card.

Also, most likely it would not matter, as the size of such games is so small, windows will most likely cache the whole thing in ram within minutes from the moment you load the game image in an emulator.

Not to mention PS1 had a drive rated for 2x or 300 KB/s so most games would have been optimized to stream resources and all that's needed at or below that speed, therefore even the weakest mechanical drive would not cause problems for an emulator.

[gabrielcarvfer]

6 minutes ago, Letgomyleghoe said:

the latency would be worse, but it would still be faster as storage media due to raw bandwidth.

It would make sense for more modern games, but for retro stuff? Using it as 2nd-level cache for HDD would make more sense, but main memory cache should suffice for retro games.
Sounds pretty fun for development though. I usually write a few TBs per day when processing stuff and have a sacrificial SSD reserved for that.

[Letgomyleghoe]

4 minutes ago, gabrielcarvfer said:

I usually write a few TBs per day when processing stuff and have a sacrificial SSD reserved for that.

using an ssd for cache has no increase in speed when writing, although i'm interested what your read speeds are as i need a mass steam game storage.

 

[mariushm]

3 minutes ago, gabrielcarvfer said:

It would make sense for more modern games, but for retro stuff? Using it as 2nd-level cache for HDD would make more sense, but main memory cache should suffice for retro games.
Sounds pretty fun for development though. I usually write a few TBs per day when processing stuff and have a sacrificial SSD reserved for that.

It doesn't make sense for modern games.

Regular DDR4 can be bought in bigger quantities than what you have on a video card.  Why block 4-8 GB of VRAM on a 12-16 GB video card, when you can easily buy 32-64 GB of DDR4 

Same for sacrificial SSD ... just buy some DDR4 and make a ram drive, unless you need to write tens of GB of temporary files.

[handymanshandle]

There's literally no point in doing such a thing for Nintendo 64 (and PS1) games. At all.

[ragnarok0273]

Exactly.

But we need something to do.

I've been working on making a hard drive screech on command recently.

[SkilledRebuilds]

With a PS1 or Console game on EPIC FAST storage your at the limitations of the hardware spec outside of Storage or Ram.

 

CPU, L1,L2 Buffers, Programmed QUEUES the Storage has to wait for..

 

It would be like using an SSD on a game that uses networking for assets... your weakest link isn't storage or storage speed, so there will be limited to no gains bar a few percent at any given time but far from expected results.

 

VRAM Drives were made a thing with a guy making a program to run Crysis3 in his 3090s VRAM.

He did it as a WHAT IF. Therr wasnt good enough results to further deep dive into it.

[gabrielcarvfer]

49 minutes ago, Letgomyleghoe said:

using an ssd for cache has no increase in speed when writing, although i'm interested what your read speeds are as i need a mass steam game storage.

 

I don't use it for cache, just for writing data in parallel in random patterns. Worst case scenario for HDDs.

 

Last time I've used ssd cache (64GB) for data was in a laptop (1TB 5400RPM), and it was quite fast for office workloads. Cooling was complete garbage on this Samsung ultrabook, so I've never bothered trying to game on it.

[gabrielcarvfer]

55 minutes ago, mariushm said:

just buy some DDR4 and make a ram drive, unless you need to write tens of GB of temporary files.

Yup, usually 30~40GB batches (compressed). My 24GB of RAM are usually 85~90% utilized by the simulations, which are also limited by the core count, which is limited by the mobo.

 

May change everything when the next gen Threadripper is released with DDR5 by 2022.

[mariushm]

Just now, gabrielcarvfer said:

Yup, usually 30~40GB batches (compressed). My 24GB of RAM are usually 85~90% utilized by the simulations, which are also limited by the core count, which is limited by the mobo.

 

May change everything when the next gen Threadripper is released with DDR5 by 2022.

Current B550 and x570 motherboards support 128 GB of memory, if you're using 32 GB sticks. They're a bit expensive though.  16 GB sticks are common and not that expensive.

 

I often had to deal with tens of thousands of html files, normalizing or changing urls (paths and stuff) inside them, mass search for keywords or image links, etc so I've used ram drives with ntfs compression enabled to increase the size of the ram drive. If you're careful and the content is compressible, then reducing to near half is possible but the compression is not quite real time.

but the contents need to actually be compressible for it to work.

[8tg]

Figure out how to adapt the technology cards like the radeon SSG use for on-board memory expansion and apply that to a consumer card to have storage easily accessible by the gpu

 

important note: for the sake of videogame emulation, there is literally zero point in doing this

 

[gabrielcarvfer]

22 minutes ago, mariushm said:

Current B550 and x570 motherboards support 128 GB of memory, if you're using 32 GB sticks. They're a bit expensive though.  16 GB sticks are common and not that expensive.

I'm with a 1st gen ryzen (1800x and b350). I've already finished most of my research that required that continuous use, USD->BRL exchange rate is really unfavorable right now, supply shortages, etc. 

 

I'm waiting a threadripper or 5950x successor with DDR5 before thinking of upgrading.

 

If prices remain insane, I'm probably moving development to the cloud and get a console for gaming...