Create a RAM drive in Windows 10 to improve a modded instance of TES V Skyrim

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How can one create a RAM disk in Windows 10 to enhance a modded TES V? I'd like to to use a ramdisk to load assets of TES V to improve performance. I have 16Gb of ram on this laptop and Windows 10 can only utilize 3.5Gb while playing Skyrim My thinking would be to to make a ramdisk of 8Gb to load essential assets, not my complete mod list, and leave 4 Gb for the OS and 4Gb for TES V Would this work?

Todd

Posted 2016-06-21T00:40:50.390

Reputation: 277

Maybe this should be posted in Arqade? – Todd – 2016-06-21T00:42:34.933

Perhaps you should allow more then 30 minutes for somebody to answer your question? RAMDisk fully supports Windows 10, your question, isn't all that clear – Ramhound – 2016-06-21T01:08:04.937

What exactly are you implying – Todd – 2016-06-21T01:08:53.180

That the question is on topic but currently not clear. Do not cross-post across multiple SE communities – Ramhound – 2016-06-21T01:10:11.933

I understand that Win 10 fully supports RAMDisk my question asks how and if it's even possible within the parameters I stated in my post, hence, I thought this might be better answered in the gaming community. – Todd – 2016-06-21T01:32:02.627

I have played around with RAM disks for various purposes. To my surprise, when I finally got around to buying a good SSD hard drive, I found that the SSD delivered the same (perceived) performance I was enjoying using RAM disks. For what you're doing, SSD might be as good and easier than RAM disk. – misha256 – 2016-06-21T03:50:06.337

Answers

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First, couple of things to consider:

  • A SSD has been shown to generally provides similar loading times than a RAM drive in practice (source), even though in theory a RAM drive is faster than a SSD in theory. Also, a SSD would make other things faster, from loading DirectX and other drivers, in addition to game files themselves.
  • If you make your RAM disk too large, you may prevent Windows from improving the loading times with caching data on your unused RAM.
  • If you make your RAM disk too large, you may induce pagefile swapping, severely slowing things down.
  • Since you won't be able to copy the entire game, it will be hard to effectively determine which files are most often used and slowing down the most.

That said, to try doing this, you can use symbolic links (junctions, for folders) to make some files or folders from you Skyrim installation point to the RAM drive locations instead.

  1. Create a ram drive using one of free softwares available online. Some benchmarks and prices here. I personally like ImDisk because you can create an ISO image of your RAM disk with your files for easier loading the next time.
  2. Copy a folder or some files, such as the HighResTexturePack**.bsa to the RAM drive
  3. Move those files from the Skyrim installation folder somewhere else temporarily on your HDD (to restore them later)

  4. Open command prompt as an administrator, and create links for each files to the RAM drive location, using mklink. mklink /h for a "hard" link (so the game can't tell the difference) and /d for a folder link (junction). For example, if R is your ram disk, those examples link one file or one folder.

    mklink /h C:\Skyrim\Data\BigFile01.bsa R:\BigFile01.bsa

    mklink /d C:\Skyrim\Data\Textures R:\Textures

  5. Play the game.

mtone

Posted 2016-06-21T00:40:50.390

Reputation: 11 230

Since ram is volatile I think it would be essential to somehow write that data to back it up. Would you agree? – Todd – 2016-06-21T01:25:17.470

@Todd On step 3, I suggest to move the files you want to cache on your Ram Disk elsewhere on your HDD, you'll have to delete the links (in Windows Explorer) and put back the originals if you want to restore the normal state. The idea I propose is to cache only a few big data/texture files that don't get written onto so you can loose them from RAM at anytime and easily restore the normal state. If you install/remove mods, make sure to restore the state first. – mtone – 2016-06-21T01:28:15.717

Simply cause its counterintuitive "A SSD has been shown to generally provides similar loading times than a RAM drive in practice," would be nice with citations. That said, I agree that an SSD would be the smart choice simply cause overall performance would be better – Journeyman Geek – 2016-06-21T01:35:07.083

I am using an SSD, however my proc is less than desirable as well as the integrated gpu, I realize that my potato system holds me back, which is why ask, if sending assets such as HiRes DLC to a RamDisk would improve my performance. This is not a critical need in all reality. It is only a test computer used for learning different methods not used by an average user. – Todd – 2016-06-21T01:57:15.413

3@JourneymanGeek It's hard to find semi-official sources (eg. not forums) benchmarks, but I've found one. There was one youtube video that got a faster result on HDD than SSD, obviously the windows' own caching kicked in there - not a worthy source! I've also tried it myself with Fallout 4 just for kicks and didn't notice any improvement whatsoever. Furthermore, Windows is likely going to cache the often-accessed ramdisk, thus double wasting memory. It's fun to toy with, but I doubt it's ever worth it with a SSD. At a certain point, CPU is the bottleneck. – mtone – 2016-06-21T01:59:03.050

Thanks for all your input, I hope this will help others. I will give this a go this weekend for testing purposes and report my results. – Todd – 2016-06-21T02:01:56.100

1To add to @mtone, Skyrim is notoriously a CPU-bound game. Your best bet is dialing back the settings, really. – user2943160 – 2016-06-21T02:07:31.273

Asked: 2016-06-21T00:40:50.390

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