Hello every one.

 

I just got 16 gigs of ram in my sandy bridge PC with another 16 gisgs planned for the end of the month.

 

I want to start experementing with ram disks as I am getting 8000mb/s read and 9000mb/s write using Crystal disk mark on the ramdisk i set up yesterday.

 

I saw on another forum how to change the FSX.CFG file and how to copy the simobjects folder to the ramdisk so im comfortable with that.

 

I want to add the scenery file to the ramdisk as well but i do not see any command line in the CFG file that points to the location of the scenery file as it does with the simobjects file.

 

So the question is this. is it possible I copy the scenery folder to the ramdisk and then add a command line to the CFG file to point to the location of the scenery file in the ramdisk as one would with the simobjects file.

 

Hope this makes sense.

 

Kind regards.

 

Barry

I want to add the scenery file to the ramdisk as well but i do not see any command line in the CFG file that points to the location of the scenery file as it does with the simobjects file.

 

There's no one "scenery file". The scenery layers can be anywhere you like, each in a different place if you like. Their location is specified in the SCENERY.CFG file which is in your ProgramData\Microsoft\FSX folder. Each layer has an entry like this (example only):

 

Local=Scenery\BASE

 

That is a path within your FSX folder. If you want to move any layers out of the FSX foolder simply give the complete path instead. For instance my FSX path is E:\FSX so the above is equivalent to:

 

Local=E:\FSX\Scenery\BASE

 

You can move all or only some of your scenery folders to your RAMdisk and edit each 'Local' entry accordingly.

 

Regards

Pete

I personally tried RAMDisk myself (I too have 16GB of RAM) and decided to try putting all the AI aircraft Simobjects in there to try and get rid of the obvious series of loading stutters that occur when coming into a heavily populated area. Since I have MyTrafficX that was 10GB worth. Sadly I found that it made absolutely stuff all difference so I got rid of it again. Obviously it is just to do with how the engine is populating the traffic rather than the HD read speed. Good luck with it though maybe you will have better results.

Pete thanks so much for the reply.

 

OK so let me see if i have this correct. I made a file called "scenery" in the R drive and copied the "AFRICA" file in to that so my path should be " Local=R:\scenery\AFRICA" ?

 

And a second question. I mainly fly in Africa. Is it only necessary for me to copy the AFRICA folder over to my ram drive or is there in other file in the Scenery file that i need to copy?

 

Thanks again for the help gentlemen

What are you talking about a "ram drive"?

What are you talking about a "ram drive"?

RAMdisk = virtual drive on RAM

 

I have no idea if FSX gets much smoother when compared to SSD, but remember RAM is a volatile memory, so everything in it will be deleted when you turn off your PC.

OK so let me see if i have this correct. I made a file called "scenery" in the R drive and copied the "AFRICA" file in to that so my path should be " Local=R:\scenery\AFRICA" ?

 

Yes.

 

And a second question. I mainly fly in Africa. Is it only necessary for me to copy the AFRICA folder over to my ram drive or is there in other file in the Scenery file that i need to copy?

 

Several of the base sceneries will be relevant too. It isn't easy to determine which -- they are categorised by a grid system. There are also generic bits which apply to all. I'm not sure how wise it is to be too selective, nor am I sure it will help much unless your Memory chips are really fast -- memory can actually be as much of a bottleneck as the disk interface, especially these days with buffered hard drives and the I/O controllers built into the main processor chip.

 

I played with a RAMdisk setup for a while and didn't really find that much difference, even with 2000 MHz memory. Maybe if I could have placed a lot more into the RAMdisk it would have been more worthwhile, but I only had 8Gb to play with, not up to 32 like you. With 32gb you could easily put the whole FSX install up there and only leave add-ons for access from HDD!

 

In the end it is processor speed and video ram space which makes the difference. i use fast SATA 3 SSDs and they certainly help loading speeds, but it's the 4.8Ghz overclocked processor and the 3Gb GTX 580 which provides the smooth flying! ;-)

 

Regards

Pete

WOW Pete I cant thank you enough.

 

I have SSD's that i run my programs off. My processor is a Sandy Bridge 2500k overclocked to 4.3 Ghz and i have a 560ti

 

I have my Simobjects and Africa scenery files in the ramdisk at the moment so will play around with it.

 

Thanks for your help

You might have a look at FancyCache, which is very easy to configure. Just select the amount of memory to be used and select the volume which should be cached. I'm using it for a month now in combination with FSX, and although it's only a beta, it does exactly what it should do. Using a caching program instead of a ramdisk makes copying of the files dispensable, the utility is doing this for you. You can download a 6 month trial at http://www.romexsoftware.com/en-us/fancy-cache/index.html

 

Regards, Andreas

And what do you think of it with FSX Vario? And can you tell me what your settings are for FSX

I select my fsx volume, set blocksize to 16, cachesize to 2048, and chaching strategy to read; all other values untouched. Then I start caching and start my fsx.

 

I don't notice a big improvement in frame rate, maybe two or three, but my textures are loading faster, resulting in less blurries.

I also use Fancycache here with FSX. I have 16GB of 2133 MHz RAM, and I use 8GB of that to cache my FSX drive (a 300 GB Intel SSD). Between the cache and SSD I can't remember the last time I had scenery loading stutters or blurries. I don't know that having things loaded in a RAMdisk improves things much--FSX appears to have a reasonably good predictive scenery caching scheme that preloads scenery tiles before you get there.

 

Where the big cache really makes a difference is if you are doing development or testing work and need to get in and out of FSX many times--once FSX has loaded the first time, subsequent loads are right snappy.

Thanks W6 will give that a try and see what the results are. :-)

Hi folks, I had kept up with this, and other RAMDisk/RAMDrive threads and was quite interested in the possible benefit.

To the point that my curiosity overwhelmed me!

I just completed a new rig and included 64GB of Corsair Vengeance so I could see for myself.

 

Cooler Master HAF 932 Advanced

PC Power & Cooling 950w PSU

ASUS Rampage IV Extreme X79

Intel i7-3820, 5+GHz

CORSAIR Vengeance 64GB DDR3 1600 @1666MHz, 16GB for Windows, etc. and 48GB RAMDisk for FSX

Power Color HD 7970

Samsung 830, 128GB SSD, Win 7 Ult x64

Samsung 840 Pro, 512GB SSD, FSX Add-ons.

WD 1TB Black, FSX Photo scenery

WD 2TB Black HD Back-Up

 

I did a direct comparison of FSX performance, on the RAMDisk, vs FSX on the Samsung 840 Pro.

The only real benefit of the RAMDisk that I saw was the faster launching of FSX and loading of Flights.

 

The Test Method(s), and Results, are here: http://www.flightsim.com/vbfs/showthread.php?257691-RAMDisk-vs-SSD-tests