The Ultimate Storage Drive for Gamers? - Dimmdrive Review
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- Опубликовано: 15 янв 2025
- Has Dimmdrive found a way to make RAM drives feasible for the average user? Or is this volatile storage solution still out of reach...
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Intro Screen Music Credit: Adhesive Wombat - Check out his channel here: / adhesivewombat
Outro Screen Music Credit: Approaching Nirvana - Sugar High / approachingnirvana
![Blox Fruits Dragon Rework Update [Full Stream]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/EqDAp8udhm0/mqdefault.jpg)
"Speaking of things that cost too much, Razers!"
-where I thought Linus was going with that segue
Also, no music on outro
Same
smart
Oh gosh I thought he was going to bring up Phantom Glass...
L3ON360Z
THE BEST DARN SCREEN PROTECTORS OUT THERE!
He literally said that as soon as I read this comment...
I would like to see a modern update to this. Since a lot of games use ridiculously high resolution textures and have huge open world maps I imagine load times would benefit far more nowadays than in 2015.
Well... looks like it's time to download more RAM ( ͡º ͜ʖ ͡º)
Download a free ram at notavirusdotcom for free! Just enter your creditcard information and get your free ram for free!
Potato on a stick Hell YEAH, MY PC IS GONNA BE SO QUICK !!
***** I'll be sure to check that out. Seems like this will be a great boost in performance. :D
No lie before I knew shit about computers, I didn't know that was a joke XD
LOCO MAN NOT SO FAST!!! U NEED TO PAINT SOME RED FLAMES ON YOUR PC TO MAKE IT FASTER!!!
Late Comment: "Speaking of things that cost too much: Razer!"... "s" so nearly.
+Armadillito Please note, I have a razer headset and am considering other products by them. The comment was just irresistible.
+Armadillito no one gives a shit
For a brief moment i thought Linus was referring to Razer lol
Baraka You think that, good for you. They are however much more convenient than boom mics or desk mics. I understand that they have mediocre mics and compromised sound but mine does the job well enough.
Baraka Er... thanks for that... strong opinion. How much did you pay for yours? Did you look after them well? Did you use a stand or just dump them on your desk?
Many are crap, but a £50-100 headset is a decent investment for a semi-serious gamer.
32 GB of ram... a year from now his test bench has like 128 gb. :p
ArsArma next year it's gonna be 1 full terabyte
1TB ram is already here but on server motherboard and cpu
Still 32gb sadly
apple has 1.5 TB 😂
1.5TB RAM Apple New Mac RIP>>>>>>
Finally, I can put the 128 gigs of ram that I downloaded to good use.
I guess this is useful for speedruns.
I think that loading times are not included in the total time of the run.
Loving the new outro music! Very minimalist ;)
I don't see myself gaining any use from a ramdrive... My SSD is plenty fast enough for me. (But i mean a 4x Raid 0 or M.2SSDs wouldn't go amiss).
dat outro music thou
I use ram drives for doing data-mining. I created a 2gb ram drive and moved several large .csv files to it. I then was able to search the data 100's of thousands of times as I had my system cycling through various data-sets. It was a lot more convenient than having to create a multi-table database and constantly update the date in it.
>its 2019 now
>laughing at those 32gb RAM back then
Linus, the future is now old man
lol is 32gb bad now? I never use more than 16 even after upgrading to 32
@@saltysoysauce95416? I only use 8 gigs
RAM drives are perfect for using in conjunction with Nvidia Shadowplay. When you have the 'shadow' streaming to a RAM drive it means zero performance drop when recording :D
+dab88 Or when you have it record on a dedicated HDD.
I have 2 HDDs and 2 SSDs, not to mention external storage. OS is running on SSD1, games are all on a Samsung 850 Evo 1TB, one HDD is used for large data files such as raw videos and movies and the other hosts all my other crap (music, pictures, software kits etc).
Work on obs?
It's not hard to figure out some use will actually be benifical, and this may be just the one : recording video streaming !
4:36 "Storage speed has been well documented to have 0 impact on your fps" .. I guess if you live in a vacuum and only do selective benchmarks that's true however the benefit of a ram drive isn't just the absolutely ridiculous transfer speed which is often 10x higher than that of an SSD but also dramatically reduced latency, reduced latency means less time between when a frame is requested and when it's drawn..lower latency == higher possible fps & smoother gaming. I did enjoy the video Linus however your test are only showing the time it takes once the game has already been loaded (cached into ram) and then making the claim that there is no difference, you are loading the game and then comparing how long it takes to "Continue" from the menu screen which is going to load a minimal amount of data and not going to be a fair comparison. I find this video highly flawed and I typically enjoy your videos
System storage only affects loading time. Video cards have on board memory for what you're describing at the beginning of your post.
What? Do you think that transfer has no latency cost to it? Regardless the point I was making you didn't address which was the load time differences
Actually I've thought of a good test for you to prove me wrong, take a ram drive, an ssd, and a normal hdd and load up a game at the absolute lowest settings so it just absolutely cranks up the fps the cards can render to the point where the bottleneck becomes the data coming to the card and you'll see where lower latency makes an impact.
60fps - 17ms max
120fps - 8.5ms max
180fps - 5.5ms max
240fps - 4.2ms max
In order to get those frame rates those are the minimum round trip latency your computer needs to have to request, receive, and render. Lower latency has an impact, just not in your limited scenario
+asmithdev And that's why they don't keep data necessary for rendering on RAM but on the video cards own memory that's closer and isn't bottlenecked by tha PCI-e bus...
Obvious troll is obvious. Since no-one can be that oblivious to how computer architecture works.
+asmithdev Data latency over PCI-e is well documented, which is why programmers load all their graphics and graphic programming on to their GPU. If you want to see a very crude example of what I'm talking about, just do a quick google search about "shaders". Adding your graphics to a ram drive does ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do the fps, only the initial loading time. It CAN affect performance if you're playing a crappy (i.e., not optimized for multi-threading/queuing in known bottlenecks) coded game (I actually play three MMOs with this problem that loads personalized user data on the fly), but that's more a problem with the game you're playing and less with the structure itself of GPUs.
What happens when the game requires more memory than be kept in the GPU memory? Oh no, it's only "retarded" in limited ideal situations where your card has ample memory, you precache everything before hand, but no no there is NEVER a situation where you might be hitting the disk for that data possible. Nope we live in an ideal world and sandboxed environments with standardized dram sizes across all video cards and all games require the same amount of memory.... /s
One thing I've always wondered : games are made to load data from disk to RAM themselves; so if you load the game in RAM, unless it knows it's there (which it won't), it's reading & writing back to RAM; essentially that means the RAM Disk benchmarks we usually should probably be slashed in half ? In any case on my personal tests I barely noticed any difference, but I did have the impression that world streaming (i.e. GTA) was a bit more snappy... but it could have been the placebo effect.
Because the software acts as a virtual drive mount. Like loading ISOs as discs in Virtual CD Drives. Thats why you have to assign a drive letter in the config, windows treats the software as a physical drive
That's also why the RAM Drive is worthless. The majority of your game exists in RAM or GFX memory when you're playing it anyway. Only zonal and level changes are of any size and loaded on demand from your HDD.
I run just 16g ram, and I have TONS of ram free while playing games.
That means those games are NOT (pre)loading everything they can into RAM.
RWBimbie You realize they only load what's required right? It's not going to load the entire landscape of skyrim when you have a draw distance of 100yds
That is the entire point of the RamDisk. The game is simply loading what it needs atm and not preloading my ram to its absolute fullest extent. By using a ramdisk we can fill up that ram to the top, PREloading into highspeed ram the stuff that games havent chosen to read off the disk yet.
I would rather start the game and go mix a drink & grab snacks while it did one long preload before gameplay.. than have lots of load screen wait times while I am sitting there trying to play.
RWBimbie But it's not going to. You're loading the installation to RAM - but none of it will be read unless needed anyway. It'll load textures for areas you may never go to. And it still needs to be processed, HD speeds are not the only point of bottleneck in gaming
What game engines need is better predictive loads. If you're in an area that only has X number of next locations, it should have an option to preload those for the people that have the RAM. Loading the entire installation is just an asinine shotgun solution to a problem. Even with 16gb ram, my system never uses even half of it for any game i've every played
When AAA companies want to prioritize something looking pretty over not playing like ass, then maybe something like this would have a use. Considering we can't get games that multi-core properly...shit like this is pointless
I Must say, that on my Arma 3 server I created a ramdisk and that made a huge difference because the disk latency was just too high with about 40 + players online. So that helped me out greatly.
wtf, I thought this was a new video then the old intro came on
TruckerGuy135 same
Vito Skolan look at the upload date Jan 2015
I was debating on getting Dollar Shave Club, and then I saw you sponsor it! I signed up the same day I saw your first sponsor video. Keep up the good work!
He used to say that storage speed doesn't affect FPS until in 2019 he discovered that it did
The main thing to keep in mind is that, once the data has been read from disk once, your OS will cache the files in RAM anyway to save having to read them again. This is why the first load time on a game is often slower than the second and third, made even better if you've got plenty of spare memory.
Goosebumps when i hear that older intro
There use to be PCI cards that were made to be RAM drives. It held up to 16 sticks of ram and an external, 12v power source. Its onboard bios mounted it as a harddrive when the computer booted.
RAM disks are great for various application caches and temp files. There is an increase in performance of Photoshop, but it's only visible while working with huge-ass images, although nothing significant. And RAM drives are a blessing for 3D simulation caches, but those caches can be hundreds of gigabytes large, so that's some pro grade stuff we're talking here.
you got to be crazy for using ram disk on professional work.
a blink of power outtage and all your hard work gone.
LargeBanana Me? I don't use it at all. I would if I had the cash, but if I had the cash, I would also get myself an UPS. And most of the time caches aren't that important, these are not project files. In case of physical simulations their only value is hours of simulation time but that's it.
uhhhh, okay?
LargeBanana Most professionals have a UPS. So a power outages is not a problem.
BlueFoxTV if power outage is not a problem then reserving chunks of your ram for storage is the problem. on professional work such as editing and things computer use a shit load of ram, sometime all of it. by cutting chunks of ram to make storage out of it, you decreased the total amount of ram that the application can use too.
so for professional work i really don't recommend but no one is stopping anybody lol.
Depending on how unoptimized your game loading & files packing mechanism is, you probably won't get significant improvement over a modern SSD. The major bottleneck of loading files for a game is the seek time and assets unpacking. when you try to load a lot of files from a mechanical drive, it will spend most of the time looking for a specific file (or the chunks), coupled with the slower transfer speed, it will result in the "slow loading" you're experiencing. However, with ramdisk, you will get about 100,000 lowered seek time but with a highly optimized loading mechanism, you generally wont notice much of a diff with SSD even though SSD seek time is about 100 times slower, unless you have A TON of smaller files to load.
Seek time and transfer speed asides, most of the loading time are spent in unpacking the assets in the memory. If you use a ramdisk, you actually using your system memory very inefficiently (load packed files from ramdisk and unpacking it into system memory again) so you will still see a similar loading time when you compare SSD with ramdisk because games usually employed lazy loading technique which loads only the assets it need most.
That being said, you might still benefits from ramdisk if the game is very, very badly optimized ( a huge number of unpacked assets to load directly from the drive and poorly optimized loading mechanism ). in general, most games don't benefit much from ramdisk compared with an SSD.
So could you have a dimmdrive part of a raid 5 setup where whenever the computer is booted down, the dimmdrive is completely wiped, but when it is booted up, the drive is rebuilt because of raid 5? Sorry for the monstrosity of grammar errors.
The problem: raid usually operates by the slowest drive, so the ram drive doesn't really do anything.
Plus raid 5 rebuild time takes about the amount of time to complete write a single disk(also depending on the slowest one)
So the idea might as well be simply execute a program to complete copy a hard drive onto the ramdisk Everytime computer boots up.
When you mentioned the name first, I thought you were talking about a piece of hardware.
Speaking of which, it would be possible to attach a small battery, or capacitor to the power pins of a RAM slot if you wanted the data to persist. It wouldn't be useful unless it was supported by the OS though.
Since upgrading to an ssd we have had to wait in the lobby for players with slow systems to load anyway, so there would be little advantage even if it was faster.
I have however seen (a long time ago, probably ddr1 or 2) 5.25" drive bay ram enclosures that have a battery and controller to use ram as storage. Before ssd's it seemed an interesting idea but would be expensive and pointless now.
***** Agreed, I just switched over to an SSD, the problem is not speed, it's being able to afford the upgrade. I always wanted an SSD but when I saw their price I kept on with my 7200 RPM hard drive. Now that they are significantly more affordable I bet we will see a lot of enthusiasts and gamers or even just hobbyists switching to SSD's.
***** I have been running ssd's for a couple of years now, they were expensive but they are getting a bit more reasonable now. I think a lot of people had never experienced the extreeme difference that it can make to a system so weren't going to spend so much. I hope it doesn't take "years" I wouldn't build a system without one now.
Of curse the basic knowlage of "how too" and the expense of buying a system with one already installed may also be putting people off.
Have u seen this?
www.ddrdrive.com
Yukhan Shimunov similar to what I mentioned which would have been sata2(? Don't remember, might have even been ide). Why limit it's speed with pcie x1? Bet it's not cheep.
A lot of OLD ass arcade games (you know before Linus was born), used big ass circuit boards of RAM on them to help playing the games. I still have some of them for posterity sake.
That Dimm RAM seems like a good thing for gaming laptops and consoles, I think is very practical and could be an upgrade to gamers who want to have more storage options as they could save the games inside the RAM, which is a nice thing, they just need to study them in order to make them better, but I think they are great, specially for gaming, will be a good idea to be partial storage for games, for example to save the patches in them of the games so they can render 4K also, or something like that.
So the TLDR is get an SSD.
orrr ram drive + NVME M.2 SSD?
@@Matthew-om3rz ram drive as cache for ssd?
That DSC ad, with the machete, is god-damn hilarious. Seeing that ad on an old LTT video is what made me try them out.
Linux allows RAM disks and I've also got an OCZ synapse caching drive for my favorite games. I use flashcache in Xubuntu 14.04.1. This is just old news but thanks for sharing non-the-less
nice video! I had been wondering about this. Plus, thanks for turning me on to dollar shave club. Their razor are the bomb and theyre cheap! I would recommend them to everyone!
last time I ever used a ram drive was on Amiga OS. perfect for storing install files and temp stuff though.
Yes, those seconds does mean a lot sometimes. I recall playing Infestation & when doing strongholds i always had to fight thru a crowd of other player untill actually getting to the stronghold location (& rarely even reached it). After getting a samsung ssd i dicovered that i was pretty much always the first in & could simply sprint right to the stronghold to get first chance at shooting the enemy inside. Definately has its uses to load in quicker.
Not really a fan of RAMDisk applications. My motherboard was bundled with ROG RAMDisk and I tried it, did not really see what its point was. It's a nice concept, but not really practical. I tend to rely on my PC's storage for reliable data storage, RAM is not reliable unless it's in a server because you know ECC. Not to mention I like having my SSD boot me into Windows in less than 15 seconds, having a RAMDisk makes that load time take minutes depending on what's on it. I will continue to stick with SSD's paired with HDD's like most normal gamers and content creators because it is practical and not a flashy gimmick.
Surefor gaming, but HOHOHO when you go to videoediting, the best you can get!
Maiska123 I disagree, with the amount of time it takes to load applications into a DIMM drive, you could be editing raw content which in turn eats into your bottom line. Yes DIMM drives are fast but they are unstable and they cost more to maintain than they are worth. 32 GB of DDR3 will cost you at least $220 bucks let alone the DDR4 that Linus was donated from Corsair. There are all kinds of cheaper SSD's like the PCIe slot SSD's or the M.2 SSD's that the MacBook's and the Mac Pro use, or you can go and buy an actual SSD that sits in a RAM slot. Content creation is not worth risking my applications to be lost after a sudden power loss.
That's where they are most commonly found seeing as Apple was the first one to commercially announce it on all of their mobile product lines, where as the other manufacturers either did it only for their gaming/workstation models, or put it off entirely until Intel's 9 series chipsets.
must be new here z87 and am3+ have it welcome to pc building community noob =P
Murdercom You must not be able to read, I clearly stated "other manufacturers either did it only for their gaming/workstation models, or put it off entirely until Intel's 9 series chipsets." That does not mean they did not do it for Z87, in fact my mobo has an M.2 slot that I don't use because then it disables my PCI lane. Therefore I must have one of three things, an Apple computer (ew gross), a gaming motherboard (uh hell yeah ASUS RoG) or a workstation board. I did not see Dell, HP, Acer etc roll out M.2 on all of their higher end products saying we have flash storage the way Apple did. I am not saying M.2 is exclusive to Apple either like your dumbass implied. I'm just saying that they were the first one to commercialize it on that large of a scale which is more than I can say for Gigabyte, MSi, ASUS or ASRock.
That was a crazy smooth transition from the video to the advertisement.
Dear God, 2 minute ad in an 8 minute video, you need to shave more time from you ads. What's wrong with a 30 second ad? Yes free knowledge blah blah and the rest. Fanboy's attack
Mike King I put them at the end for your convenience. So easy to skip!
This is his job from what I know, you can just skip it lol...
My name is Mike King and I'm going to bitch about an add in a video that's completely free for me to watch. Welcome to Jackass.
@Mike King funny how you realize you're a fucking idiot yet you still speak lmao
shave time =D?????? Dollar Shave club is the way to go :v
finally a linus sponsor that i actually found useful. I subscribed to the shaving thing btw
Actually, yes HUGE CAVIOT (have to be picky about which folders you put on the ramdisk and you should be familiar with the use of Symbolic link / Junction links). Example, for Skyrim I placed my Landscape texture folder on it (copying and renaming the original) and created a junction link to it in the og location. Works like a charm and increases my FPS allowing me to add landscape mods that would normally kill my game performance.
Great vid, as always. But why do your latest videos appear to have excess brightness? I saw this on multiple systems and it looks a bit weird... Just a friendly remark!
After many years of watching, I finally bought a shirt =)
I would be far more interested in how this handled load times in mmos more than a single player game.
Ramdisk ... Amiga users will know ... :)
I bought AMD's RamDisk utility a while back just to test it out, and it's definitely not for gamers. However, since I run many other programs including Photoshop, Reaper, etc. I decided to install them using this utility. The difference between the RamDisk and my 840 EVO with RAPID enabled was ridiculous, Photoshop didn't even load the splash screen, it immediately opened up at the snap of a finger and was ready to go, no wait time. The same can be said with Reaper, Firefox, Chrome and many other programs. I found it beneficial in this aspect, but since I only have 16GB of RAM it isn't optimal. I think in the future when 64GB+ configurations become more mainstream, you'll see this be more practical, so long as install sizes don't increase drastically...*cough* GTA V *cough*
6:00 My reaction: Razer? Oh, Razors...
While hardware performance has obviously improved massively I'm still yet to see a better implementation of a ram drive than AmigaOS had in the early to mid eighties. No need to set it up, nor any need to use extra software, nor do you even assign any values/size to the "drives" (although you can add extras of specified size), it simply has a ram drive as standard that is exactly the same size as the amount of free ram available. As ram is used the size of the ram drive reduces and the more you copy to your ram drive the less system ram available. You can also do a software reboot of the system and retain anything on a ram drive.
A typical response, as is the case in this videos response is something like, "what's the point?", or, "my ssd boots Windows in 5 seconds", and for some uses that may be true, but there's scenarios where using ram as storage simply can't be beaten.
Try installing a dev. env. to ram, along with sources and compile in ram for example. Especially for large projects,..... no ssd can come close. There's also the heavy, heavy i/o battering an ssd or hdd will cop when compiling (reading sources, compiling objects, utilizing headers and linklibs, etc,.... there's probably no heavier storage i/o load in existence).
Another thing I like about ram drives,..... temporary storage. No longer a need to keep certain archives temporarily extracted in random harrdrive locations. Simply use the extracted archives contents in ram and next time you hard reset the machine all the junk is gone.
Too bad I didn't know about this before I could afford an SSD. I had to load games off of an external USB 3.0 drive. It was awful, but I had tons of RAM.
I am curious why did you spend on more RAM instead of an SSD in the first place
This was before SSDs for gamers were mainstream. At the time sticks of RAM were waayyy cheaper. I got 32gbs for $100 when the cheapest SSD was like $180 if I remember correctly. Even if I went light on the RAM I couldn't have got an SSD with the saved money.
This program was probably not even close to becoming a thing yet, so its all good. lol
+jbatacan2 This one specifically? No, but ram drives have existed for years long before this, so yeah this does make it extremely easy to do so, it really isn't all that difficult to do it by getting a free ram drive software such as the one from dataram or imdisk and there are countless others, motherboard manufacturers for instance like to build one into their control panel or overclocking software, then you just manually move your games onto one.
It's good you own all that ram, but the truth is......You don't even need all that ram for dimmdrive. If you only had 2gb of ram(which no one has by the way)it's good enough to run a 40GB full game. People don't realize dimmdrive is a powerful tool and assume you need massive amounts of ram which is not true. I only got 12GB ram but look what I'm doing ruclips.net/video/Wn0-TRMOAbc/видео.html
I always wanted to know about this subject, thanks mate.
PS: Your new segue into "please subscribe" is much better, well done.
I would not recommend the program by the way, it's very simple and doesn't really give you anything that you couldn't get for free already.
This is actually surprising to me. I figured the ram drive would have been a bit faster than that. Honestly, the first time I saw them use unraid this was the first thing that popped into my mind. Could I make a ramdisk with it to use as a boot drive for a VM. It would be a very fun project to attempt but buying a workstation or server with enough ram and VT support is a bit more than I can chew.
It's impossible to silently pass-gas without the hairs in yer crack.
Thanks for the review linus i saw this on steam a few weeks ago and was intrigued by it and was thinking of getting it plus a harddrive instead of an ssd but this really cleared things up thanks
Is there a "Dimmdrive" type program that works like Dimmdrive, but instead dumps the game you choose from your HDD to your SSD and then back to your HDD with the click of a switch when you are ready to swap them around again?
I may have found a solution. Has anyone used Steam Mover?
Anthony Brothers You can do that manually, without software. Close steam, move (copy/paste) the game from your SSD to HDD. Start steam, and then you need to install it again. You can then find the HDD place you put it in, and it will verify everything and download missing parts (if you missed some) and you're good to go. I might've forgotten a step but you can google it. :)
Swordie100 I appreciate your post, but I'm wanting something that is a simple click and doesn't require reinstalling the games. Steam Move may be the solution, but I haven't had the chance to try it yet.
Anthony Brothers It doesn't reinstall the game, you copy/paste it and steam verifies all the files in the new location which takes about 5 minuts. It updates the registry and all.
Don't do this. Every time you do that you generate a lot of writes to the SSD. Even with Wear leveling and whatever, you'll kill your SSD a lot quicker than normally if you play a lot.
I wonder how good this would be at mitigating system damage caused by the Denuvo Malware that many games are infected with. Since it does many and frequent read/write cycles, this might be a good way to keep your system safe while the developers disinfect their repositories.
Jeezz Linus. Almost 40% of the video is advertising. I understand that you need the revenue but come on, this is worse than TV commercials.
Except you cannot skip TV commercials. You can easily skip these, he even put it at the end of the video.
+MightyMag If broadcast/cable TV featured an uninterrupted 44-minute-long episode followed by 16 minutes of ads, absolutely nobody would complain. That would be the dream.
+Nouman Khan What has that to do with this? Apples and oranges man.
+MightyMag How is advertising obnoxious if it doesn't interrupt the actual content and is placed at the very end? Man's gotta eat, employees to pay and a company to run. Ad is at the very end. Everybody wins.
The point is the ad placement in this video is nowhere close to TV ads.
+Nouman Khan It's not ads themself, it's the volume of them. There's a line on how much ads you can take, and for me that line is crossed well before 40% of total content.
Great video Linus. Was wondering if you're considering posting How-to videos on your channel. Cheers
I wanted to know Why IT didnt work. Why isnt ramdisk faster?
Odd Arne Roll a couple different reasons, system bottlenecks, any decent AAA game that old has been optimized to load up about as fast as it can already, and the test was only testing loading up an existing save. It would have been better to time loading screens that are already in a game but most newer games don't really have them any more unless you're waiting on a queue or there are very few within the game so the benefits are quite limited.
Thank you, thow i dont understand what "optimized" to load up faster really means.
How does that work?
You would think the RAMdisk was read faster than a SSD when it was read, what does the gameloader do with the extra time?
If loading from storage isnt a bottleneck, what is?
Lets say you have a new PC 10 years in the future, i prosume the game would load faster on a faster machine, but what is the bottleneck then? CPU? Why?
Odd Arne Roll optimizing software(this isn't 100% accurate but for explanation purposes it's good enough) means you've taken something that was coded in an easier to code method(for humans) and make it easier for the computer to figure out. The bottlenecks would be the cpu and/or the connections built into the motherboard to connect everything, along with possibly the firmware of the hardware components of the computer and the drivers the computer has for it's components. This is also why you get updates to your drivers and firmware, most decent companies continue to optimize their software after release, especially if it keeps selling well.
The game loads the stuff it'll need to load faster into RAM already, so loading everything on RAM has pretty much no effect on performance. (Like why would loading the cutscene you already watched when you played 3 weeks earlier have a positive effect on performance if you're not going to watch it in this session).
I would suggest primocache, which is essentially a RAM drive for the most accessed files of the whole system. It also has 2 level functionality so you can use an fast SSD as an additional buffer.
Of course the drawback being it uses your RAM, so OS loading times will be dependant on your level 2 SSD if you use one.
The other drawback is not being able to read the loading screen tips.
I'm going to like the video just for the butthole-shaving talk.
"OH SNAP...
I could put my.... OPERATING SYSTEM on it!"
No idea why, but the hand motions and facial expressions Linus made while saying that made me laugh way too much....
So...
DIMMDrive makes your HDD load like a SSD. Rapid cache or whatever it is does nothing.
Very interesting!
as always excellent quality content about things enthusiasts should be, but may not be, fully aware of the pros and cons of
oh my god linus... is this actually coming out of your mouth? "storage speed has been well documented to have 0 impact on your fps" ... i have no words............ except for WTF?! it does impact your fps! it causes fps drops and lag stutters
If all your assets are loaded, then it honestly shouldn't
*****
there are games that have to communicate with the drive constantly.
That shouldn't need to when it could be loaded from the ram if such a game(s) exist.
Sinx
for example: minecraft loads the world from the drive not from ram... and having a slow drive could impact game performance a LOT. i was just playing mw2 from an old hdd btw... not very pleasant! my game stuttered and sometimes even locks up because the drive is just too slow. (30 mbp/s)
Damian Damianio Minecraft should not be loading from your drive, Minecraft uses RAM, you can test yourself by checking the Task Manager or using the In-game console to do it. Minecraft uses a ton of ram, and flushes it out when it exceeds a certain amount to ensure that you do not run out. If you're stuttering it another problem I had an old drive with my PC, did not impact performance only Loading Times.
I work retail(Target) and we lock the razors up because they are small and easy to steal and expensive. People will steal them and then resell them online. We dont lock them up behind glass though, they are just locked in a little case that needs to be opened at the register, just like the dvd cases.
I would love to see a video about the M.2 ssds and the setup process, as well as performance wins in game. I personally think this could be a good and much more costefficient way to boost speed in windows boot, gameloading and also storagespace for fast datatransfers. Mostly z97 and "better" boards already own a M.2 slot but it is not that well know just now, maybe you could help a bit, i would love to see that kind of "benchmark" video?
This sounds very strange 7 years later
We did it for wing commander 2.we crated a bat file that would create a ram drive. Then we used stacker to double the drive size. Then it copied the game to it. And started it. When done the bat file continued it’s instruction by copying the save games back to the the hard drive. Worked
Great vid Linus. Also love the "Beaver & Butthole" t-shirt, especially as Dollar Shave Club is the sponsor!!! :-D
Ramdisks are for temp folders and scratch files. If you force your browser to cache on a ramdisk, the number of IO's you'll be saving on your sdd/hdd will give it back months of life, if not years. Same thing if you're downloading through torrents or usenet or some other protocol that does multiple parallel writes.
I've been using Superspeed & Primo for work. Excellent for loading AutoCAD and Primo is also Excellent for storing Autosave files on. It dumps only changed parts to the disk, so no losses on computer crash. I use Dell Workstation computer for that, it has ECC RAM and huge expansion possibilities. Starting up from SSD RAID 0 configuration from PERC H310 makes the loading time nothing. The only wait is while BIOS is looking for and testing RAM. Even on Quick boot it takes a while.
When you say it doesn't affect framerate, I think it really depends on what kind of game you're talking about. I'd love to see a test with a id Tech 5 game like Rage or Wolfenstein The New Order. These games stream massive textures from disk to RAM constantly while playing, and slow storage makes (or should make) a significant impact in performance. I agree that the general benefits of using RAM drives for gaming is likely pretty minimal, but a great test would be with an id tech 5 game.
I don't think it would be worth it to spend more time testing other scenarios (for the LTT crew). These results show exactly what we expected and there is no reason to believe it would be different when streaming textures. An SSD is more practical, less expensive, requires less fiddling than any RAMCache Software and produces the same tangible results. It would be unjustified to buy more memory over picking an SSD if your goal is to reduce game loading times or stuttering. If these things still occur with an SSD then it means the bottleneck is somewhere else.
But the test wasn't what is "more practical, less expensive" or about how much fiddling is required. It was about performance. I don't get how you come to the conclusion that there's no reason to believe streaming textures constantly during gameplay would make any difference in this test. If the test is worth doing at all, it's obviously worth doing with a game where it might actually matter, or at least the games that are obviously most likely to be affected. You could argue the test isn't worth doing at all, but if it is, why wouldn't you think it'd be worth testing with the worst case scenarios?
I agree that it probably won't make a difference, but I don't know for sure. Storage speed is a fairly complex thing to measure. Read/write, both at the same time, small blocks, large blocks, sequential or non sequential (not necessarily relevant here) etc. RAM disks for gaming obviously aren't cost effective or relatively practical. I'm only arguing that if you're going to do the work to test the performance of something like this, there are more effective test cases. That's all.
***** What I meant was that I would prefer if LTT wouldn't spend more time benchmarking this software (or any other similar RAM Cache Software) instead of doing other kinds of videos. Your proposed scenario is fair, they could have tested Texture Streaming in Wolfenstein however I'm not sure how they could have come up with a realistic / reliable test procedure that would have yield any meaningful results (any more than the one they managed to come up with the loading time test).
I could try to find a way to quantify the tangible performance of using RAM instead of an SSD for texture streaming, but I'm not sure how I could test it in a realistic scenario. My best bet at the moment would be fiddling around with UE4 to see what kind of stats I can spew out of it. Do you have any suggestions or more specific instructions on how one could do that ?
***** Hey there. You're basically correct. Hard drive speeds DO make a different in some types of games. ARMA3 and a heavily modded Skyrim, for example. I'm hearing a *lot* of feedback from Dimmdrive users stating that the in-game transitions are smoother, FPS drops don't exist, and that FPS is even increasing. I believe this is simply due to these games having some incredibly large graphic asset files, ones that are tens of times larger than GPU memory sizes.
I'm working on a good way to benchmark these sorts of gains because I really DO believe they exist. So many people are reporting it, that something must be going on here, and that gets me very, very excited with Dimmdrive.
That's why I was thinking id tech 5 games would be an interesting test, because they have enormous contiguous asset files (basically one asset for the entire level) that gets loaded as you go through the level. The id tech 5 games tend to perform very well anyway though, so it might be hard to benchmark. Dimmdrive is a pretty interesting idea anyway, even from just a hobbyist / enthusiast perspective.
6:00 "Speaking of things, that cost too much: Razer!" :D I loled hard
Speaking of RAM, would it be possible to do a video talking about the heatsinks on enthusiast RAM sticks, including how much impact they have, if it's easy to remove them or cut them down, etc.? I've heard people say they're a waste of space, but I'd love to hear the opinion of someone who has done a lot of system building.
I have this software. Did 5.2 GB/s in Readspeed with 1600MHz Corsair Vengeance RAM :)
Some of us were doing this nearly 25 years ago with the Amiga by copying and executing games from a RAD: device. Once the RAD: device was configured and mounted in Workbench you copied the game to across to it and then performed a soft reset. The RAD: drive then booted the game at lightening speed.. RIP Amiga :(
Results as expected on the RAM disk test. As for the razors, the reason they keep them locked up or in silly containers is because people steal them. They're small, expensive, and easy to sell in a black market. I remember seeing something on TV about it years ago.
I remember running a Ram Drive 15+ years ago for Unreal Tournament, it actually did work back then but tended to screw up a lot of Windows installs in the process. Not sure why.
crazy that 32gb of ddr4 at 2400mhz was over $500 5 years ago, the same amount at 3200mhz right now is a little over $100
I like how that noctua vibrates every time Linus touches the table.
Greetings from Puerto Rico Linus. Love your videos. Sadly we only have (besides online) Best Buy and TigerDirect stores and Tiger just closed so is a bit complicated buying PC parts.
Saw that on Steam and didn´t really understand for what it was made for and then i read a ton of bad rewievs and hatings in the steamcomments and i understood immediately it wasn´t worth the attention...Anyway thx for clearing! Nice vid.
While first one to the heli sounds good in practice, in reality BF4 is like 40gb with all the dlc. On top of that, BF4 also has a ready screen now that requires at least a few people from each team to ready up before the match, meaning you're never going to get a heli faster than someone with an ssd.
The difference between an SSD and a RAMDrive is pretty much nonexistant mostly due to choices in how developers optimize their loads but if this same solution could be used to swap games in and out from your HDD to a cramped SSD it would actually be useful!
The sweet purr of a flapping Noctua fan can be heard a few times from 7:10 and on :3
I think the mention of how file cache works with windows would have been nice. Just having lots of extra unused ram your system will automatically cache accessed files. Making the next load much quicker, so just having lots of extra ram will help instead of having a ram drive and requires no configuration all modern OS's do it.
ramdisk does make a diference in frames but the only thing it changes about frames is that it stabilizes the frame rate
When will the new whole room water cooling be out I enjoy those videos :D
nice outro bruh! stealth ninja style.
Pretty cool Program. But i would have liked it to see Linus tested also some other Apps and Loading times. Im quite sure there must be some scenarious where a RAM-Disk is much faster.
Btw always nice video :) LinusTechTips
I am a big Fan and following you for a long time now but PLEASE increase the contrast and sharpness a little more on your videos! And maybe increase the volium just a little. Everytime i watch your videos i think my screen is broken and my sound is too. PLS!
I used a RAM drive for handling data analysis where I was using huge flat .csv files and cycling through them repeatedly. It was blazing fast on my 8350!
LinusTechTips Would love to see the benchmark for compressing video :)
0:24: We do lots of cool stuff on this channel
Me: Not convinced....
I use a small ramdisk for by browser cache. That way it is regularly cleared and I also expand the lifespan of my SSD...
I notice all of the game benchmarks are loading single-player game saves. This may be my own ignorance, but since most savegames are stored in the user folder in windows and not the game's program files, wouldn't you still be limited to the speed of your system drive in all of these scenarios, as would appear to be indicated in the results? It seems to me that the most accurate way to test this would be to run a VM from a ram drive and benchmark the game running through that. Again, though, I could just be misunderstanding how saves work.
as always great and fun videos. here have another like!
We have the same smart watch !! I hope you review it soon i love the g watch r
The old ltt intro turned my rtx 3080 into integrated intel graphics
I'm now sad
hahaha 6 years after
When is the next part of whole room water cooling setup coming put?
Very informative! Thanks a lot.
Well. It seems that 16 GB of RAM that I want happens to not be available. So I'm considering buying 32GB.
I intend to just each time I boot, install or just copy libraries for DAW plugins to it. This way I could play piano with my pc with pretty much zero latency.
Any new software on this in meanwhile?
As one of your tests you should've had the loading time for minecraft running a feed the beast pack with 200+ mods, the loading time alone for my system, is 2-3 mins.
Did you change your mic set up? Just sounds slightly less bassy and more echoey.