Playing GTA V on a RAM disk setup
Playing GTA V on a RAM disk setup
There's a thread for this kind of stuff. Also the ram wouldn't improve the loading times significantly due to other bottlenecks, either in the PC itself or the design of the game. This was covered in Mark Cerny's presentation in "The Road to PS5" video.
It would still be interesting to explore... perhaps try a game that relies a lot on storage speed or just run calculations... I don’t know... just a video to check out.
The speed boost from a faster drive isn't enough to noticeably shorten loading times, as shown in comparisons between SATA and NVME SSDs. NVME offers a 5-10 times improvement, but that doesn't translate to a 5-fold faster load.
You could set up a smaller ram drive, let's say 24-48 GB and move A PART of GTA V, let's say mainly the folder with the texture files and crap that's constantly streamed into the game as you move throughout the map. You can use junctions to redirect some less important folders to the old storage with the game being none the wiser, as it's a feature of the file system - see SysInternals junction utility : https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinte...s/junction Alternatively, you can use the built in mklink utility to create junctions https://superuser.com/questions/752538/m...nction-exe Though keep in mind that if you have lots of ram, windows will automatically fill the empty ram with the game files, as the game reads chunks from them, so most game will eventually end up sitting in ram anyway. I've used ram disks in the past for things that involve lots of parallel reading and writing, like downloading a website with 20-50 parallel download threads (each thread then parses page and looks for more links and adds those to queue, and the page has the links inside modified so you can browse the site offline, hence the lots of reading and writing) Also useful when you have to create lots of thumbnails or edit lots of images (mass crop, brightness etc) ... doing 20-40 in parallel can slow a mechanical drive to a crawl, or make even a ssd read at slower speeds.
Reads from SSDs are stored in unused RAM, ready to be released when needed. With ample memory, many game files can occupy that space. For smaller titles and larger systems, the entire game may be cached. I questioned whether pre-caching files manually before launch could improve performance, as the initial load would still require media access. It seemed worthwhile for smoother gameplay, even if it meant spending more time pre-caching than saving time. Someone had tested this with FFXIV Shadowbringers and Stormblood, noting similar performance trends: RAM disks outperformed Optane, NVMe, then SATA SSDs and HD drives. My tests showed less difference between NVMe and RAM disks, though my disk benchmarks didn<|pad|>.
I remember that GTA loading speed is similar to 550MB SSD and quick NVMe, so the game size isn't a big factor there. However, when it comes to the software side inside games code