I have 16gb of ram on my system of which barely 4gb gets used, before I got my SSD I used half my system ram for a ramdisk where I moved the games data folders for faster loading, then I got my SSD and moved the games data to that.

I was going to disable the ramdisk as I could not find a use for it, but now I also have nearly 12gb of redundant memory, I hate waste, then the other day I tried recording full screen with FRAPs and found my standard 7200rpm hdd was not keeping up very well stuttering the recording, then I hit upon the idea of changing the FRAPS video folder to the Ramdisk, note I could have put it on the SSD but as most are aware writing to the SSD speeds up ware.

This worked better than expected, I can now record full frame at 30fps with smooth playback, note that a 2 minute full screen recording will use half of an 8gb ramdisk, this is not a problem to me, as soon as the ramdisk is full I batch the videos through Virtuadub straight to my standard harddrive.


PS, I am aware that windows can use a lot of system memory when multitasking, but in my case the only other program besides Skyrim that might be open is Firefox.

OS: Windows 7 home premium 64bit.

I game on this machine and I have not seen any slowdowns or issues in around 50 hours of play (now level 40). I notice that the load times are greatly reduced because of the SSD which is barely 1-2 secs long when I fast travel or enter a new area. I have the system monitor running on the other screen while playing and the RAM used by the game never goes over 1 GB wit 1.3.10. But my 2 CPU cores are usually pegged at 95%+ constantly. I find myself lucky of not getting the numerous issues seen on these forums (and it was something that held me back from buying the game for a while before I decided to plunge).

Asus Sabertooth 990FX
Athlon II X2 250 - 3Ghz (waiting on second gen/rev of Bulldozer and kinks to be ironed out before upgrading)
16GB RAM
128 GB SSD (1 TB Data HD)
Windows 7 x64
Radeon 6950 2GB

This is interesting...my experience is that a decent 7200 rpm drive in 6gb SATA will only have difficulty keeping up if you are recording at 50+fps (at full RGB lossless setting 1920x1080). If you are noticing a difference, are you recording at higher settings than that? I created a RAID0 for FRAPs recordings and video editing, but I cap my recording fps at 48 so I don't think my RAID really makes a difference there.

So, I can see how ramdisk can help in extreme circumstances, but until I see some benchmarks (or unless you are running your 7200rpm in an antiquated connection or USB2 or something), I'm having a hard time understanding exactly how and to what extent this is helping you. But interesting nonetheless, gets me thinking...

Recording fraps video to system ram is significantly more effective and stable.

For example each 30 seconds that passes recording at 24fps results in a 4gb file....

this means that i'm recording a BOATLOAD of data every second which is very VERY demanding on the interface controller for the drives as well as CPU time... and lets face it FRAPS does mostly record in a raw format for both video and audio.... hugely demanding just to playback such files.

I would love to record at above 24fps but unfortunately short of using system ram to do it, even on an SSD, makes for a relatively difficult time to sustain. It's not uncommon to witness some stutters and stops/lag and audio desyncs. And recording to a 7200 RPM VERY fast hardrive is just pointless at the resolutions i'm recording at.

I've since dropped down from 32gb of ram to 16 ..... so that means i can record basically a minute and 15 seconds before i fill the 10gb i set aside for ramdisk vs the 26 i had before.

Mine are old SATA I, I also have the limiting factor of running my game on ultra with some heavy texture mods.

Sounds like you have a beast machine, I'd consider mine mid range
CPU AMD AM3 quad core 3ghz
GTX470 607mhz stock clock.

hey neat, good trick I'll have to remember this since yah even recording to an SSD I get a brutal bomb in performance at these resolutions.

Btw awesome again thanks for the idea, works like a charm.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F7DUifY3iug&list=UUMGrzJ4Ss94J2C_p1RZ879A&index=1&feature=plcp

Of course Youtube butchered the quality but yay I can record in triple resolution and its 'okay'

Nice vid.

here an example of a triple resolution youtube video i did using a SSD running in SATA II mode with a hindered intel ICH10R controller

top it off on a single 5770 1gb card at the time too lol

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z6ch5jtNwqU

Was about to say that looks fairly standard res but I keep forgetting you keep your monitors in portrait. Excellent stuff buddy. Did you put that up on skyrim nexus as a raw file? I used to do that with videos I'd make of Fallout 3.

No i didn't... although i do have some texture files i've modded on skyrimnexus..... in which some of the videos are linked for the armor sets...

I haven't played the game for almost a week and therefor haven't recorded anything new on my current system which i've finally migrated to my house. I may not have it in a month but we'll see....

http://www.skyrimnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=4408

Vidoes embedded in the link below under the video category
http://www.skyrimnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=1978




Btw.. the raw file would weigh in at about 17GB in size.. which means it would take me approximately 108 hours to upload at the maximum upload rate i'm capped at.... which isn't much... unfortunately..

Er sorry was refering to the final product, I used to upload videos to the fallout3 nexus since youtube slays quality so much. Was always fun trying to re-edit things to stay under the then 300MB cap for uploaded files to the site. I also just noticed the tell-tale 'level up', man still no fix for that eh? Freakin annoying for sure.

yup... I've tried dozens of potential fixes and i can't seem to get any gamesas answer about how the hell to get rid of it.. and why it's even there in the first place.