An idea for how to benefit from Skyrims low installation siz : Othor Games

» Thu Dec 08, 2011 2:51 pm

Man.., I hate rich people..

Meh, ram prices fell to ￡40 per 8 Gb recently, so I stocked up on 24 Gb (triple channel kits stayed a bit more expensive though). Ram prices always fluctuate like mad, in a few months I'll be able to ebay them for more.

The problem is that games arent ever going to use that much ram, not even Skyrim will use more than 3 Gb ram.

» Thu Dec 08, 2011 12:08 pm

I was initially dismayed by hearing that Skyrim would only have a 32 bit executable and take up only 6 Gb installation space.

Most people would think therefore, that having lots of system ram like I do (24 Gb) is a waste for games like Skyrim.

But heres an idea if you have at least 12 Gb ram on your system - Find some Ram disk software online and turn all your extra ram over 4 Gb into a ram disk. Copy paste your oblivion folder onto the ramdisk and enjoy 4000+ Mb/s read and write speeds for virtually instant loading.

Free ramdisk software only allows up to 4 Gb ramdisks to be made though, and you have to pay to unlock the full software to make a larger one. I've never tried any ramdisk software before, but I will start looking for some now.

Just make the RAM Disk your page swap disk - won't speed up initial loads, but will prevent game from slowing down as swap file fills up with map data as you change locations

» Thu Dec 08, 2011 11:55 am

and what are you going to do when you have to restart your computer?

» Thu Dec 08, 2011 4:22 am

I have done this with a heavily modded Oblivion install (12GB). I loved it. http://i438.photobucket.com/albums/qq102/Starforce9/12GBRamdisktransfer.jpg I also use DataRam software to manage it, very nice to work with. You can save a copy of the image to your HDD....granted it takes about 3 minutes or so to load it from HDD into RAM again once you want to play, but loading times are almost gone.

» Thu Dec 08, 2011 2:26 am

There is absolutely nothing you can do gaming wise to utilize twenty four gigs of RAM, I don't even understand why you would even consider buying that much RAM in the first place, if gaming is your focus. I mean sure if you're running servers or something, or some sort of high end mass simulation of some sort, but gaming? 24 gigs of ram is pointless no matter WHAT game, for the next 10 years.

» Thu Dec 08, 2011 7:10 am

There is absolutely nothing you can do gaming wise to utilize twenty four gigs of RAM, I don't even understand why you would even consider buying that much RAM in the first place, if gaming is your focus. I mean sure if you're running servers or something, or some sort of high end mass simulation of some sort, but gaming? 24 gigs of ram is pointless no matter WHAT game, for the next 10 years.

Yes and 5 years ago I thought that no one would ever need more than 4GB of RAM, I mean anything above that is just overkill.

and here I am today grinding my teeth because my computer keeps on crashing due to low memory

» Thu Dec 08, 2011 3:53 am

Free ramdisk software only allows up to 4 Gb ramdisks to be made though, and you have to pay to unlock the full software to make a larger one. I've never tried any ramdisk software before, but I will start looking for some now.

http://www.ltr-data.se/opencode.html/#ImDisk

Just because your silly proprietary world likes to set artificial limits doesn't make them hard limits that even free software must obey

and what are you going to do when you have to restart your computer?

You save the image of your ramdisk before you turn it off and reload it when you turn it back on.

Just make sure you have a UPS