RAM disk & Radiant

Post by **a13n** » Mon Oct 02, 2006 1:37 pm

Hi.
Just tried RAM disk driver for Windows2000 today. (256MB allocated)
The time radiant takes to load textures was longer than expected but a bit shorter than from harddrive.
It seems to give me a bit of silence when radiant initially starts up but not so much speed.
Does anyone here use RAM disk constantly for radiant?
If so, do you think it is useful if any at all?
In my opinion it is useless considering the sacrifice of the total amout of ram available, at least as far as qer concerns.

Post by **Foo** » Mon Oct 02, 2006 1:59 pm

What did you put on the ramdisk?

Post by **Silicone_Milk** » Mon Oct 02, 2006 2:01 pm

What prompted you to try this out if I might ask?

I usually just keep radiant on a usb drive then copy it on to the current harddrive Id be working off of.

Post by **obsidian** » Mon Oct 02, 2006 8:37 pm

Why would you put Radiant on a ram drive? It's not like Radiant takes ages to load or is limited by long seek times or anything. So of course, there will be a negliable benefit to performance.

Post by **^misantropia^** » Tue Oct 03, 2006 6:36 am

Probably pretty pointless[1] since the OS tries to cache popular files in memory as much as possible anyway. Plus, Radiant spends a significant amount of its time decompressing / parsing assets (BSP, MD3, JPEG, shaders; TGA less so), something a RAM disk won't remedy.

[1] And what a nice alliteration that is.

Post by **a13n** » Tue Oct 03, 2006 8:11 am

Although you can easily imagine guessing from the size of my RAM disk, I put least contents within quake3 installation directory as well as radiant.
The least contents consist of all the extracted textures from pak[0-8].pk3, re-pakked pk3, namely devpak0.pk3, which is essential to run quake3 to test compiled maps.
In short they are the whole mapping assets needed to use radiant.
And my harddrive is capable of transferring files @ 100MBites/sec, ...theoretically.
So what do you think considering this environment?
Only benefit I can gain is the reduced disk I/O?

Post by **Foo** » Tue Oct 03, 2006 10:54 am

When the files are in a compressed container you have to factor in the CPU time needed to inflate the files.

Post by **a13n** » Wed Oct 04, 2006 7:59 am

My textures are all decompressed state, hence no need to be extracted from pk3.