Thoughts on Vram and a Ram Drive

[frillybob101]

I have noticed that a lot of new games that have been announced lately need to have alot of VRAM. I have two, 2gb cards and don't really want to upgrade anytime soon.

So my thought is what if we load the textures into RAM with something like DIMM drive?
http://dimmdrive.com/

For when the game exceeds the amount of VRAM available (for me I have 16gb 8gb just for DIMM DRIVE) we could just toss the textures into RAM. I know regular RAM is slow than VRAM but doesn't that have to be a better solution than either an hdd or an ssd?

Let me know your thoughts.

I don't really have any way to test this right now as my other 8 gb of ram are in the mail.

 

[rgd1101]

yes RAM is alot faster then HDD and even SSD. And no, you don't need to setup a RAM drive for that.

 

[dovah-chan]

At higher resolutions (generally 1440p and above) a card might benefit from more RAM. But generally if someone can even afford a monitor at that price they most likely have a card with around 3-4GB. While playing on 1080p or lower, most games don't utilize over 1GB to my knowledge.

When speaking of RAMdisk technology, it's much more preferable and cost efficient to just use an SSD. It may be that RAM is much faster than an SSD but its only a second or two of a noticeable difference compared to just using an SSD versus a RAMdisk setup.

I've tried the AMD RAMdisk application and booted up Skyrim on it and then compared it to my SSDs load times. (I compared the first and longest loading screen that you get when starting the game up for the first time and then 3 loading screens of going from Solitude to Windhelm) and they were very close if not the same. (no actual times were recorded but it was mostly judged from a real world user opinion)

 

[frillybob101]

I've seen battlefield 4 using close to 1.8 gigabytes of ram on by one 1080p display.

That being said has anyone ever tried forcing textures into ram on a lower VRAM card to see if it would improve performance at all or at least stop the stuttering?