Installing steam version of 3dmark on ramdisk

[spectatorx]

Since i have 32GB of ram i put some games and benchmarks into ramdisk for, in some cases, improved framerate and frametime. Recently i've tried to see if ramdisk as a drive for 3dmark will affect benchmark score in any way. By default steam will not detect ramdisk partition as valid partition to install games and software on. I was thinking about how to workaround it and finally came up to conclusion that steam can be fooled fairly easily: just install steam on ramdisk, then ramdisk will become default install partition for steam games and software.

This worked as planned. Once achieved i've run timespy few times with results similar to as running it from my default hdd, only noticeable change were shorter loadtimes between stages of timespy.

Just wanted to share results if this my experiment in case if anyone else would wonder how to do this and if it is worth at all when squeezing every single point in 3dmark.

 

[Kursah]

Once you've created the disk and provided it a drive letter, can't you go to Steam's app, go to Settings > Downloads > STEAM LIBRARY FOLDERS then Add Library Folder? I've done that when I have had 1-2 other locations/drives I want my Steam installs to have the option of going along with the C:\ install location of Steam.

Maybe with RAMDISK it works differently? Been a long time since I've messed around with staging one of those on my personal system.

I expected it would help with load times, now I want to snag another 16GB RAM so I can test! Though admittedly, I don't do as much gaming, benching, tuning or stressing as I used to.

If you own Ashes of the Singularity, I'd be interested to know how much quicker it loads from a RAMDISK, but it is currently taking up about 26GB of my SSD space so you'd really have to push the RAMDISK size. That game loaded so much better on SSD than HDD, more noticeable than other games in my experience. I bet with RAMDISK it'd be amazing.

 

[spectatorx]

...

Steam just was refusing to detect ramdisk partition as valid partition, in any way, maybe it would need different ramdisk software or other changes in ramdisk configuration but from what i've found on google i wasn't the first person with such dilemma.

So far i did test few games and the biggest improvement i've seen in crysis 1 and 3 where minimal fps literally DOUBLED. Here you can see crysis 1 as an example:

On loading times wonderful example is final fantasy xiv shadowbringers benchmark tool where total loading time dropped from hdd's 30-40 seconds to 10 seconds on ramdisk: