I recently started experimenting with a RAMDisk for web browsing and since it worked pretty well, I began wondering if any particular games would benefit from using a RAMDisk?
I realize games are very different from web browsing (and in many cases the graphics card is the limiting factor) and that it would only really make a difference where a game was creating a temp file for whatever purpose, and that most games are already programmed to use the maximum available memory anyway.
However this type of scenario has not really been possible on PC gaming until recently, where we are getting a standard 4Gb of ram on most new machines, and it's possible the unused RAM could be somehow put to good use.
This is the software I'm using (Win 7 64-bit with 4Gb ram):
http://www.romexsoftware.com/en-us/vsuite-ramdisk/download.html
Edit: I already have a SSD
Best Answer
If you have the spare ram, it is definitely worth it to dedicate some of it to a ramdisk. I have an 8 Gb ramdisk for my computer. I also have a 60 gb OCZ Vertex 3 SSD. The Ramdisk (although severely limited in storage) is 70-100x faster than my ssd in some areas. My ssd has seq read/write speeds of ~11000 mb/s and ~14000 mb/s respectively. If you were to install a game onto my Ramdisk, it would load pretty much instantly (an exception would be a part where you need to log in). I play a game called "War Thunder". It took an average of 30 seconds to 1 minute to launch to the login screen, and then another 30 seconds to load the graphics engine and get to the "hangar" where planes are displayed. I dragged the game onto the RamDisk and it launched to the login screen in 4 seconds, logged in in 10, and entered the hanger 5 seconds later.
TL;DR Anything you can put on a ramdrive will open dozens of times faster than a identical game on a SSD. This is certainly true, unless the game is relying on a server to acquire large amounts of information. At this point, you need to wait for the server.