RAMDisk VS something else

Gazuntai · May 5, 2013

SIDENOTE: When you read this, go under the assumption that your games will never ever crash because game developers managed to make games without issues. Hard to imagine, I know, but still.

Okay, first off I just want to say my general understanding of how games work with RAM/VRAM. My understanding is that when you're playing a game your CPU decides which files you might need in the near future and sticks them in the RAM/VRAM for you to use when needed, which is faster than taking them from the HDD. When you do something like fast travel in Skyrim it pretty much craps itself and shoves everything needed into the VRAM and RAM to get you out of the loading screen. When you alt tab out of a game and come back it feels like everything just got pooped out of the VRAM/RAM and your FPS takes a huge dip and whenever you spin around it seems it has to reload everything all over again (quite annoying as I alt tab a lot). I also know about RAMDisks and SSD's, it's more about having no loading screens opposed to reducing them. I feel like a loading screen can take away from the immersive-ness (especially if you use them to take a bathroom break or get a drink).

Not a super detailed explanation of what I think actually happens, and it could be wrong, but this is where I'm coming from.

Okay, I was sitting having a conversation with a friend of mine (he isn't very tech savvy, in fact he only knows things about tech that I blab on about for hours every day) and he was saying that the new Assassins Creed game on the PS4 apparently aims to have no loading screens and be completely open world (not really interested about this or anything, nor do I know/care if it's true as I'm not buying a PS4) and I was going to tell him about RAMdisks and how they can make loading screens just so much shorter on a PC.

Then a random thought came to my head:

"What if you could just load the entire game onto the RAM/VRAM and just rid yourself of loading screens all together?"

So we talked about it for awhile and I came to the conclusion that for this to happen a game would have to be built up from the ground up in order for it to have any form of support for this. I then thought you would have to have the option to run it normally for lower end systems.

So, I wanted to ask 3 questions:

1) Do you think this is even possible right now? (I'm sure loading screens will be a thing of the past one day for the most part, I mean with today's technology)

2) If you loaded up a game and it gave you these 2 options:

a) Load game normally

b) Load entire game into RAM/VRAM(/whatever else) eliminating loading screens (will take 15-60 minutes)

Would you actually be willing to load a game up, wait an hour and then play it with no loading screens? If you're only going to be playing for an hour it's probably pointless but if you planned on playing something like Skyrim for maybe 5 hours?

3) What's the shortest amount of time you'd actually wait for your PC to load the entire game into your system just to avoid loading screens? I actually got bored of Skyrim after a few days the first time I played because it was too large to walk all the time yet it made you go back and forth a lot, so I fast traveled. Not to mention I wanted to go in every door I found...

Just a random thought and I was watching the Live stream archive and I thought I'd share my really badly-explained thoughts. Really if my information on how anything works is wrong I'm not really bothered. My real question is just about whether you'd be willing to do something like wait 15-60 minutes to play without loading screens.

Probably not easy to understand on the first read-through, but whatever. My autistic brain likes numbers and hates words. xD

physX · May 5, 2013

I understanded you 100% .

Yes i wish they make a RAMDISK with about 48GB of memory so there wont be more any loading screen.
For memory loading up they can borrow SSD transistor with about 250mb/s- 500mb/s write speeds.
So the game will load for about : Skyrim p/example : 7GB with mods/400mb/s = 18 seconds -20 seconds.
offcourse this will be very expensive but anyway i would go and buy it :)