Ramdisk?

[Peppermint]

Haven't done any flight simming for about a year now, had a virus that forced me to do a total reformat (lost everything, and my best FS9 install to date). I'm thinking about giving FSX yet another go, thought I know my PC is probably around average for running it. Pre-tweaks and 'FPS-addons' on medium-high settings it can get a little choppy.

I've been playing ArmA2 quite alot lately, and have noticed similarities between it and FSX. Both are simulators, both are rendering a large area with alot of ai at any one time (we already know this is what makes them slower than a regular 'leveled' game), and both have somewhat demanding graphic options.
I'm still playing around with ArmA2 settings, getting it how I like....it's still very choppy, done a little read up and I see many users of it are using Ramdisks to load much used textures, and all of them have noticed a big increase in performance. I'm currently setting up my own to see what it's like.

I was wondering, is it possible to do the same thing with FSX? For a start it would only be for certain files that can be 'directed to' from the FSX folder to another one (even on another drive). Similar type of thing to using just one sound folder and changing the sound= part of the aircraft.cfg files and entering in the folder name there.


Any of our resident techies even think it could be possible with FSX? Anyone tried it, know of anyone who's tried it?

[IslandBoy77]

Yeah I think it's possible but haven't heard of anyone trying it. There are 2 ways of implementing a RAMDisk: apportioning a piece of your main RAM, or buying one of those RAM "hard drives" that have a built-in power supply. If you've got a heap of RAM - say 8GB or more - using a RAMDisk would be beneficial. How one would actually make it happen for FSX, though, I don't know. But certainly in theory one could get a substantial lift in performance by having stuff "pre-cached", if you like, for FSX to swap in to "main RAM" from the RAMDisk. Even the fastest HDD is very slow compared to RAM.

It's probably best if you put the question up on some of the other Flight forums outside of NZ to see if anyone's been successful in making this happen. For those of use with plenty of RAM (at least by today's standards) this could be a real "cheap" way to really lift complex scenery FPS...