Major smoothness increase with RAMdisk

Discussion in 'Player Support' started by AnotherNoob, Mar 15, 2013.

  1. AnotherNoob

    I was getting some weird stuttering in game, like everyone else, but it was a lot worse when flying over amp stations, even if they where empty. So that got me thinking, if it could be a loading issue, which made me try to put part of the game (the assets folder, 9.8GB or something like that) on a ram drive, and I see some real improvement in how smooth the game feels! Could be some major placebo, but to me it is a night and day difference, I can actually aim now :eek:

    Just posting here to get some input on this, if this could be a possible solution to the problem, or if I am just going crazy :p
    • Up x 1
  2. BlackDove

    That shouldn't be necessary, as the games poor performance doesn't seem to be IOPS bound.
  3. NC_agent00kevin

    One of my Outfit-mates said getting an SSD helped his performance. That didnt make sense to me but I dont see the guy just randomply lying about it. he agreed it didnt make sense; but it seemed to help.

    I had considered getting a high capacity SD card and putting the game on it for a little test run.
  4. AnotherNoob

    I had it on an ssd before, but got a noticeable improvement when moving it to the ram.
  5. robespeare

    Can I ask how you've set this up? I've been trying it tonight out of curiosity and every symlink to the ramdisk I use gets replaced when I boot the PS2 launcher (it downloads the 'missing' files again). I was all intrigued after poring over a couple of hours of ProcMon data, too... I can set up symlinks after launcher has done it's business but it's a chore to write the batch file :]
  6. Jac70

    How fast do your loading screens load in? Can you record some video.
  7. mogwai83

    The performance increase when I went from single HDD to RAID-0 550/530 SSDs was tought to describe, the actual ingame performance was exactly the same however the loading screens flew by very very fast. The famous tripple loading screen issue takes only a second or two to clear for me. InGame though, the storage medium is mostly irrelevant.
  8. AnotherNoob


    Was the guide I used to make the symbolic links, the thing he doesn't describe that clearly is that you have to have the path name including the folder name that you moved, so you can't just have the name of its parent folder.

    And the loading screens isn't much faster then on an ssd, they take about 2-5 sec.
  9. XRIST0

    How much ram do you have ?
  10. AnotherNoob

    16 gig, so not excessively much, I just barley have enough ram to put this game on it, and then run it. While in game, I get about 1 gig to free.
  11. XRIST0

    Ok fair enough i thought so , i only have 8gb .. Sounds like a good idea though , accessing the ram is much much faster than a hard drive .. even an ssd
    • Up x 1
  12. LordMondando

    Ramdisk is hardly a practical solution.
  13. AnotherNoob

    Since it does work for me, I take it over the stuttering any day :p
    Forgot to back up the folder btw, so have to download it again :p hurray for fast internet :) the bottleneck while downloading is the 4.1ghz i7 :p
  14. oLd.Sneakers

    Well I got a pritty fast SSD were the game is installed on and the only thing that helps to improve the stuttering, the fps drops and other performance issues is to lower render distance down to 1000 ( have it set to 800 in user options but not sure it goes lower then 1000 ).

    The game is suffering from massive cpu limitations for some reason, every patch it is the same thing until they optimize it to previous patch standards.

    580 GTX @ 1 ghz
    win 7 ultimate 64 bit
    6 gb ram 1600 ( stock so no ocing there )
    i7 @ 4.5 ghz HT off 4 cores running running

    Game still uses 2 cores and is cpu limited all the time.

    Can easily test this yourself if your interested, turn the cores off via BIOS or set affinity in task manager and you will notice performance decrease going from 2 to 1 core and a no improvement going from 2 to 3.
  15. TheAppl3


    It should make little to no difference to frame rate unless he had a particularly old and terrible hard drive to begin with. Load times were of course a tad better when I switched to an SSD but my frame rate increased by 1 at best. Could be a placebo effect mixed with high optimism as you certainly want an improvement and might start seeing one where it unfortunately doesn't exist.

    Come to think of it, it could help if he was running low on memory and had his page file on the ssd instead ofthe previous hdd. It would certainly be somewhat faster.
  16. firedamage

    We are not able to reduce render distance lower than 1000 anymore after GU04. This is frustrating because right now i get very low fps due to render distance..:(
  17. AnotherNoob

    If you don't have a model loaded in to the memory, wouldn't that cause some kind of fps stutter if the graphics card had to "wait" for it to load?
  18. TheAppl3

    Absolutely but that was my point - a hard drive is generally fast enough to keep up with texture/model loading of most games. There are some games that are insanely taxing on the HDD and it applies more to those. Unless someone has an old/bad/cheap HDD it should not hurt them much at all. I noticed no significant change in frame rates between my mechanical drives and the solid state drive. If I had been using an old PATA drive with a tiny cache and terrible transfer rates, it might have made a noticeable change.
  19. AnotherNoob

    That's the thing though, my suspicion is that they screwed something up with when everything is loading, not that it couldn't load properly if they got the code straight.
  20. HellasVagabond

    I install all my games on an Kingston HyperX SSD, nothing is faster on PS2 compared to regular drives, even loading times are dependant to the servers so no reason for that.

    PS : FPS have nothing to do with drives, most games cash almost everything on the RAM, only loading times change from HDDs to SSDs and not in every game out there (games that expect packets from servers like PS2 are obviously not afftected much).