[Guide] Have you tried playing PS2 on a RAM-Disk?

A RAM-disk is a dedicated portion of your computer's RAM acting as an independent hard-drive.

Using a RAM-Disk for 'Planet Side 2' should reduce all loading times to nil and improve overall performance, as RAM-disks are roughly x10 times faster than any SSD, and easily x100 faster than the fastest HDD!

You can use any number of software programs to create a RAM-Disk, such as Data-RAM's RAMDISK software (full version here), and once created it will remain active until the computer is turned off or the RAM-Disk is reverted into normal RAM.

Your "SonyOnlineEntertainment" folder is 10.4 GB (11,196,861,870 bytes) large; you will need at least 16GB of RAM in your computer to safely play PS2 from your own RAM-Disk, as PS2 will still require 4 GB of normal RAM during gameplay.

• Step 0: Download the RAM-Disk software.
• Step 1: Create your 12,288 Megabyte (12 GB for PC stability) large RAM-Disk
• Step 2: Copy-paste your "Sony Online Entertainment" folder to your new 'hard-drive' under "My Computer"
• Step 3: Start PS2 using the "Launchpad.exe" application from inside the RAM-Disk!
• Step ?: No more triple-loading-screens!

General guide to RAM-disk creation here.
Alternative RAM-disk software here.
RAM-disks are still normal RAM, so all data in the RAM-Disk is lost when the computer is shut off.
If your computer already uses an SSD, this will still improve your performance, but you should also read this.

Did that post read strangely to you people?
Like an advertisement or something?

I find it hard to believe no one has given this a try on their own.

I had no idea you could download programs directly to ram.

Since an SSD already reduces load times to a few seconds, I see no need for this.

Sounded like an advertisement, yeah haha. My ASRock mobo came with instructions for something like this but didn't really think much about it since I run PS2 off my SSD. I thought it only really effects some load times (starting the game), not overall game performance.

BTW your link for "read this" doesn't work.

meh too much work

It might make the 3 loading screens bug less annoying but I haven't got 16GB of memory so I can't try it.

I used RAMdisk for DayZ when I had an old rig. And it was working really good. I do not see that as an ad , because RAMDisk is for free.

I've looked into this shortly, but was put off by the fact that you need to copy it every time you restart the computer. Even if it would be fast to copy it to the RAM alone, you're bottlenecking it by copying it off the HDD.

Is there really such a framerate advantage? Because I might do it since I've got 20GB of RAM anyway. Anybody got a before and after framerate or something perhaps?

Also, you might want to edit the OP. I don't think SOE would appreciate some of your links.

Framerate will not change. Only the loading times for the game will increase.

Hmmm. I could wait whilst my game is copied from my SSD to memory, or, I could just run the game which loads it in to memory.

Admittedly, I might get some marginally speedier map loads or texture refreshes, but is it really worth bothering with loading up a ramdisk everytime and initiating a copy? Probably not.

SSD is faster than a HDD, but RAM is about 20 times faster than a HDD.

Funny, I used to daydream about having 4MB of RAM back in the day so that I could create a ram disk and copy my whole hard drive over to it. Still remember as a assistant to the college mainframe operator when she told me the company she worked for just got a 4GB (Large tower with it's own air conditioning system) hard drive and thought WOW, what could you possibly use that much storage for....

I may actually try this since I've got 32GB of ram, it wouldn't be much of a problem but I'll have to look into the specifics for Vista 64bit.