Daizy on ramdisk

[cameron]

I see on YouTube that a lot of people use ramdisk to help dayz run smoother. How do I go about getting Daizy to work on ramdisk? Do I just move the Daizyfactions folder to the ramdisk and then change the Target..if so what would the Target need to be changed to?

[kodabar]

I've seen these videos too. I've run DayZ and DaiZy from SSD drives and from ramdisks and noticed barely any performance improvement. This is pretty much true of all games. Games don't tend to hit the disk very much when playing, so there just aren't any improvements to be had beyond the loading screen.

There are some games that do benefit from ramdisks. Rage is one such because it tends to load higher resolution textures from disk only when you look at an object.

Anyway, if you want to set up DayZ and DaiZy to use a ramdisk, here's what you need to know.

The first thing is to make sure you have enough memory to actually contain the ramdisk. My Operation Arrowhead folder is approximately 20GB in size, so I'll need at least that amount of free memory, plus the couple of gig the games needs to run plus a couple of gig for Windows. So I'll need at least 24GB or RAM before I start.

The second thing you need is ramdisk software. There used to be a ramdisk command built into DOS/Windows, but not any more. So you'll need some software. There's a lot of it about and it's hard to know which one to use.

Here's a list:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_RAM_drive_software

ImDisk is free and works pretty well. I'm going to use that.
http://www.ltr-data.se/opencode.html/

With ImDisk downloaded and installed, it's time to make the disk. You can either do this from the command prompt or from the Control Panel app that it installs. If you're not used to the command line, then use the app.

From the app, I choose File > Mount new virtual disk
In the box that appears, I leave the "Image file" blank (because this is going to be a ramdisk) and select 20GB as the "Size of virtual disk" and set the drive letter to be K (choose anything you like as long as it doesn't conflict with an existing drive). I click the "Create virtual disk in physical memory" radio button.

Windows may pop up a box asking if I want to format the new drive. Cancel that. Format the disk from within ImDisk. Once that's done, the disk is ready to use.

What you're going to need to do now is copy the files in there, rename the old folder and create a link to the ramdisk.

My Operation Arrowhead is located in (yours won't be):
E:\Steam\steamapps\common\arma 2 operation arrowhead

So I copy the whole of the OA folder to drive K. And I have a cup of tea, a cigarette and shout at the Tour de France on the telly because they keep pronouncing Rui Costa's namely incorrectly.

Once the files are copied over, rename the old folder (E:\Steam\steamapps\common\arma 2 operation arrowhead) to something obvious (E:\Steam\steamapps\common\arma 2 operation arrowhead backup). If something goes wrong, I need to be able to get the files back.

Okay, so our files are copied over and the disk copy is safely renamed. You could at this point, just alter the target line (a lot of YouTube videos suggest this) but that has a bit of a problem. There are registry entries that point to the location of your files, so the game is still actually going to want to read the hard disk version instead of the ramdisk. I've seen YouTube guys fail to understand this point and rave about how amazing their ramdisk is, without realising that it's all still loading from a physical hard disk still. Ah, YouTube...

So what I'm going to do is make a symbolic link. This is just like a shortcut. It tricks Windows into thinking something is in one place when it's really in another. To do this, I need to use the mklink command from the command line.

You need to open an elevated command line - right click on the Command Prompt icon and select "run as administrator"

At the command line you're going to type a command in this format
mklink /d fakeplace realplace

So in this case I'm going to type:
mklink /d "E:\Steam\steamapps\common\arma 2 operation arrowhead" "K:\arma 2 operation arrowhead"

Okay? The /d tells Windows that it's a directory and the e:\whatever is the place that the OA files were in before I started. I renamed that folder to something else. This is creating a fake folder which is actually just linked to the k:\whatever. I need to put quotation marks around the file paths as they contain spaces which gets Windows very confused otherwise.

And that's it. I'm done. I can run the game using my existing shortcut, but it'll be loading everything from RAM instead of from the disk.

This may seem like quite a complicated process, but it's actually quite easy. It's a lot harder to describe than it is to do.

[cameron]

Thanks for the help.
Unfortunately I don't have 24 gigs of ram. I'm running an amd fx 6300, radeon HD 7870xt, 8 gigs of ram. At 1080p and high settings on mostly everything (not post processing, I hate it) I get 20-30 fps in cherbobyl and 40-50 in the woods. Is this just the game being unoptimized or what? Is there anything I can do to increase performance withoutsacrificing quality?

[kodabar]

You probably don't need as much as 24 gigs of RAM - my OA folder has dozens of test versions of DaiZy variants and stuff so it's much larger than a default one. But you do need more than 8GB. Quite honestly though, I question the benefit of ramdisks for games anyway. I think those YouTube guys are talking out of their arses.

Your performance figures don't sound too bad, but I would have expected a 6 core AMD chip to do better than that. DayZ hits the CPU much harder than most games, but your CPU seems perfectly good to me. I wonder if it's using all the cores correctly. You can add -cpuCount=whatever to the shortcut to force it. Further details here:
http://community.bistudio.com/wiki/Arma2:_Startup_Parameters

I'm also wondering if your CPU is throttled. As I recall, with the AMD FX range there's some kind of throttling utility that controls how the CPU runs. Might be worth checking that it isn't slowing the CPU. I'd also suggest using a CPU meter to check if it's being used properly.

It's probably worth checking your graphics settings in-game though. By default it sets a difference 3D resolution and interface resolution. Set both to be the same and matched to your monitor and everything will look better and run more quickly. But I'm guessing you've probably already done this.

The most significant impact on performance is the draw distance. Most online servers enforce a draw distance (yep, servers can force graphics settings that over-ride what you set) of 1600 and that's a sensible value to use offline too.

Gotta agree with you about the post-processing - it's awful.

I found a video of a guy running a pretty similar setup to yours and it's flying along. So I definitely think something's wrong.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=phkB6Txg1BQ

[cameron]

So I rechecked my system settings Nd theyre still fine. I mean I run metro last light on ultra at 50fps. So I decided to see if it was the only other mod I use on arma (co war mod). After setting it not to load I'm getting 45-80 fps in the country side and 30-40 in small towns. I have yet to have time to check a large city. But I'm getting 40-45fps at the nw airfield. Over all this my frames have boosted from 5-20 fps depending on where I am. Is it usual for that mod to cause performance drops?  

[Ray]

cameron wrote

So I rechecked my system settings Nd theyre still fine. I mean I run metro last light on ultra at 50fps. So I decided to see if it was the only other mod I use on arma (co war mod). After setting it not to load I'm getting 45-80 fps in the country side and 30-40 in small towns. I have yet to have time to check a large city. But I'm getting 40-45fps at the nw airfield. Over all this my frames have boosted from 5-20 fps depending on where I am. Is it usual for that mod to cause performance drops?

Yes, the current zombie skeletons are made out of dozens of parts which increases the needed amount of CPU insanely, so the more zombies you have the less FPS you get.

In patch notes I noticed that they increased FPS rates with something related to the current skeletons so I quess time will show.