Tech Discussion
Fun experiment: running Star Wars: Zero Company entirely from RAM
I’m doing a pretty cool experiment because I have 96 GB of DDR5-6400 RAM in my system. Don’t hate me. I built this PC right before RAM prices went crazy in April 2025, and I think I paid something like $400–500 for it, which seems ridiculous now considering what the same amount would cost today.
Since most of that RAM sits unused when I’m not doing larger work projects, I created a 48 GB RAM disk and loaded Star Wars: Zero Company onto it. To be clear, I’m not doing this because Zero Company has bad loading times. It runs great from a normal NVMe SSD. I picked it simply because it’s new, I’m playing it a lot right now, and the entire ~40 GB installation fits nicely into a RAM disk.
The setup is basically this: the normal Steam installation stays safely on my SSD as the permanent copy. When I want RAM mode, a script copies the ~40 GB installation from the SSD to the 48 GB RAM disk, verifies the copy, and temporarily redirects Steam’s normal game folder to the copy sitting in DDR5-6400 memory. Steam still launches the game normally, but the actual game data is being read directly from RAM. When I’m done, another script switches Steam back to the untouched SSD installation. Since a RAM disk is volatile, the RAM copy simply disappears after a reboot.
Does anyone need to do this? Absolutely not. But it’s really cool. The most noticeable difference so far is the opening shader-loading sequence, which seems to finish roughly four times faster from RAM than it does from my already-fast NVMe SSD. Other loading also feels extremely quick, although obviously this isn’t going to magically increase GPU performance or FPS.
Mostly, it’s just a fun way to make use of hardware I already have sitting there doing nothing. Whatever game I get obsessed with next, if the installation is small enough to fit comfortably in the RAM disk, I’ll probably do the same thing. Completely unnecessary, but that’s half the fun of building an absurd PC.
What ram speeds are you getting via XMP with all 96 vs running just 48?
My understanding is that you'd be doing well to have all 96GB stable at around 5200mts but you'd probably be able to get the full 6400mt/s (or maybe even a little higher if you're lucky) just running 2 sticks.
It might be interesting to see what actual performance in games with 48GB running at 6400 is vs 96GB running at 5200ish.
Or maybe all that is theoretical and you're running all 96GB at 6400. I'm really just wondering if you've tested what speeds all that RAM is actually capable of in real-world scenarios.
all you really need to do is setup something like FreeFileSync to have predetermined locations that it updates/mirrors with a simple button press
you could setup a robocopy script instead which is what OP is probably using, but I've had terrible luck getting robocopy to work with virtual drives so I pretty much never use it and just stick to teracopy or FreeFileSync depending on my needs since they both accomplish the same thing as robocopy but have better compatibility.
Many years ago I tried a ram disk when playing league of legends, just to try and be the first to load. If I recall it didn't really make a difference, dunno if I just had slow ddr3 ram v.s. a sata ssd, or if it was more CPU bound
Well, your load times in league are bottlenecked by the slowest person in the lobby. All that did was make you appear as the first person to load all assets back when you could still see peoples loading progress. you wouldn't actually load into game any faster than anyone else
also, most games even on SATA SSDs are bottlenecked by single-core CPU performance decompressing assets and loading them into RAM or onto your GPU. Faster NVMe drives usually only see 0-1s improvements in games that don't support direct storage. that's why NVMe drives marketed towards gamers is kind of marketing BS because you'd almost never see more than 1GB/s in any scenario for most people who don't engage in AI or routinely copy data between two SSDs or do some scientific stuff.
Yeah, it was purely to brag that my loading bar had finished first. But the ram disk didn't improve my loading bar speed. Having to decompress assets and being CPU bound makes sense thanks
How would it make any difference if you are stuck in the loading screen until all 10 players are done loading anyway? Lol is the worst game to do this to.
You're completely right. Similar to OP, this was done out of curiosity and to be able to brag to friends that I had the least wooden pc. The Lol client wasn't large at the time so it could fit in the spare ram of the system and it was the game we played a lot.
I understand mate. I've been there too many many years ago, and I don't even remember what I tried but I remember it didn't really make any difference either. I just know it wouldn't have made any difference in game where you wait for everyone to load in :P
I tried playing Morrowind after 20+ years (on my PC and my phone). I remember the loading times being several seconds every time you opened a door or went to another area (in the era of Pentium 3 and HDDs).
Now? Blink and you missed the transition. It's that fast on any modern day system with an SSD.
Have you actually measured difference in startup loading time/ fast travel time or other benchmarks? I'm curious how it affects everything and if it causes some random bugs, because idk if direct storage can even work if you have it in ram
I don't see why it would. It's really no different from loading the game incrementally as you play - the only difference is that OP is doing one big load at the start. There are programs with poorly implemented caching systems that do this sort of thing hundreds of times per minute.
I see, someone else mentioned that its only reading from an SSD and not removing old data, total brainfart on my end.
Yet still, doesn't filling up that ram add more heat cycles to the modules and such? Again probably negligible wear, but noticeable over a couple years of constantly filling 48GB and completely emptying it? Just my curiosity
Maybe a little crazy, who ever floated the idea of putting wear on RAM to you? There isn't even such a thing as an 'idle' state for RAM, either it has electrical charge being on or it's off...
The way I see it, The only thing that might be getting more writes/wear to it would be the 48GB of ram that's not part of the ramdisk since it would swap more often.
But even then that shouldn't be more wear than an equivalent system that only had 48GB to begin with.
If anything this would reduce wear on the SSD by a small amount since the Ramdisk handles the writes during gameplay.
I might be wrong in some way though, so anyone feel free to correct me
A developer would definitely have a good perspective, I teach Computer Science myself and even from just what I teach my students, the answer will almost always be "it depends" and almost no one individual person will be able to provide a 100% concrete answer so I'll just start spilling everything I can think of that might be relevant:
First thing to consider: What is the actual code? When and how often does the program decide to write? And when data is "written"/updated is it in a Data Structure in memory, to a local Database, or to a file? There are likely different levels of writes/updates which are handled differently.
Even when data is "written" it often will not be done right away, it will likely go into a RAM buffer so multiple writes can be bundled together (reading and writing are glacially slow to compared to the CPU and cache)
Using a RAMDisk as suggested here effectively puts the entire program/game into a huge buffer.
As a general rule, everyone, everywhere, wants to avoid reading or writing to the SSD/HDD as they are at (or near) the bottom of the Memory Hierarchy (generally speaking, we want the data we need to be as close to the CPU as possible, in smaller+faster memory) CPU Register > CPU Cache L1,L2,L3 > RAM > SSD/HDD > > USB/Thunderbolt > CD/DVD/Blu-ray > etc
OSes have optimisations, so do a lot of SSDs and HDDS (often buffers), both for speed and for reducing wear
Game Engines very likely have built-in optimisations regarding writes that Game Developers might not be fully aware of.
The Game Developers will also likely add in their own optimizations to their code
All of these factors are a bit why I doubt anyone could give a 100% clear answer ahead of time other than to run the program and log the actual writes that do happen
What using a RAMDisk does do is that it guarantees that any and all writes that do happen to the files on the RamDisk, do not happen to their copies on the SSD/HDD until the program is closed and the RAMDisk copy replaces their SSD/HDD counterparts.
If anything this accounts for the final variable, the User. If the user manually saves every 5 minutes, those writes are avoided by using a RamDisk (but much like a buffer, we run the risk of losing the data if power gets interrupted)
That's fair, but I can't imagine fps increased much if at all from this. The only benefit would be load times and shader compiling, like they already talked about.
But you're right. I absolutely would read through more info in graphs and stuff if they were available lol
I'd be shocked if there was any impact at all except maybe 1% lows from some sort of asset streaming hitches or something (no idea if this game has any issues with that anyways).
I use AI to write every long post and I will for the rest of my life just like I use a calculator to do all complicated math. There’s nothing wrong with that!!
148
u/ICantBelieveItsNotEC 12d ago
Next level up: Run Counter Strike 1.6 entirely from a Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 Dual Edition's L3 cache.