Personal Benchmark Examples: Samsung 840 EVO 250gb vs 8GB RAMDisk Partition

[myxomatosii]

In each video.

1: Create RAMDisk
2: Create copy of game file
3: Run SSD Version, zone, etc, do stuff.
4: Run RAMDisk Version, zone, etc, do stuff.

You decide! As you can see they are extremely similar. The thread (that poofed on rollback) talking about load times with SSD vs RAMDisk got me wondering and here are the results for your eyes and judgements.

Test One: EverQuest

http://youtu.be/BuW6PV2ohtE


Test Two: (Heavily Modded) Skyrim

Lame, turns out my video recorder can't capture Skyrim. Anyone know of a good one?

[Thulack]

Cliffnotes to the video? dont feel like watching.

[khanable]

Cliffnotes to the video? dont feel like watching.

[myxomatosii]

Cliffnotes to the video? dont feel like watching.

When/if I get around to timing it I'll put it in the op.

Video has 2 points + 1 reason.

Reason: I didn't feel like recording the data necessary to make a pure info post, and video is more illustrative.

Point 1: SSD are worth the money if you play games.

Point 2: If you can't go SSD, RAMDisk are an easy half-measure, the video includes the entire RAMDisk creation and file copying.

[Swish]

the video includes the entire RAMDisk creation and file copying.

Was the program you have registered... *ahem*... expensive?

Would be interested in trying this out.

[myxomatosii]

Was the program you have registered... *ahem*... expensive?

Would be interested in trying this out.

I pretty much went to Google/Wiki (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_RAM_drive_software) and did some research on each one until I found one suitable to what I needed.

As far as free trials to what I used (http://www.romexsoftware.com/en-us/primo-ramdisk/download.html) just follow that link.

The most interesting thing I think of it all is how similar the load times are. Despite the benchmarks.

The benchmarks, as well as all of the comments on the forums, made it seem like it would load like a bat out of hell but watching both videos side by side you'd be hard pressed to say who was using a RAMDisk.

Top is SSD, bottom is RAMDisk. Two runs. As you can see the SSD only read/writes at one-third of a gigabyte per second while the RAMDisk can read/write quite nearly ten gigabytes per second. That's a hell of a difference.

http://i.imgur.com/dtZarf9.png

[Swish]

free trials (http://www.romexsoftware.com/en-us/primo-ramdisk/download.html)

Free trials... I admire your sense of humor ;)

[myxomatosii]

Free trials... I admire your sense of humor ;)

You wouldn't believe this free trial of EQ I play.

[webrunner5]

I guess your tests proves the bottleneck is either memory or CPU based, or both. Video cards are fast as hell these days so I doubt it is that.

But I would guess a big factor is Internet speeds also. Mine is 35 down 5 up, and with my SSD I zone fast as hell. Like 5 to 7 seconds. And I run a laptop that is a Sager i5 2.4 GHz Dual Core. Not great, but not bad also. So it I guess that sort of proves the internet speed thingy.

[Kutsumo]

The bottleneck could easily be server related. Around 5 seconds seems to be the best you can get on zoning/load times.

[myxomatosii]

For the reasons mentioned above is why I plan to post a second benchmark using an offline game.

One on Steam that I already own, and that has notorious load times preferably.

[tristantio]

I thought zoning had to do with the 6 second pulse cycle (maybe that was just hearsay/misinformation).

On GNU/Linux you can set up a RAM partition via the following (assume you're root):

mkdir -p /mnt/ramdisk
echo 'none /mnt/ramdisk ramfs defaults,uid=1000,gid=1000,noauto,shared 0 0' >> /etc/fstab


Then mount via:

mount /mnt/ramdisk


A lot of the modern distros also set up /mnt/tmp as a ram partition now also (in /etc/fstab it should look like):

tmpfs /tmp tmpfs defaults 0 0


In both cases 50% of your total machine RAM will be available.

Then just copy the files there and run out of that directory.

You can also record it for free via ffmpeg (you can use ffmpeg to record your active X server).