petey1434
7th July 2004 21:29 UTC
BIG preformance boost
Ok, so i love avs compared to any other vis out there because of what everyone always knows.(The sheer number of effects that can be used). But frame rates always suck because of the bottlenecks that avs gets when rendering due to the use of just the cpu. Ive found something that helps frame rates a bit, RAMDISK!
I just started to toy with the ramdisk driver for win2k after reading up on the Mach3.8 computer.(side note- that thing is bitchin)
anyway, they implement a pci card-ramdisk and I started looking at prices for these devices and they are quite expensive, then I noticed a google hit on win2k ramdisk driver, clicked it and found out I can make a ghetto ramdisk out of my system memory!
Unfortunatly for me, I bought 1.5 gigs of corsair xms a year ago and to date, windows has never used more than 50% of it, even after I disable page file etc.. But this obscure Ramdisk was like something from heaven, its rediculous how well it works. And not really knowing how to bench mark it I simply started putting media files on it and testing the seek times etc..As a bi-product I discoverd AVS frame rates almost doubled for most presets. Im using a P4C-800 duluxe mobo, with a p4 2.8 and 1.5 gigs of ram, I edited the boot.ini for windows to exclude 512 megs of ram for my ramdisk. If your inclined to try it and know how to get around windows then I say go for it.
Warrior of the Light
8th July 2004 16:40 UTC
How big (%) is this boost?
UnConeD
8th July 2004 16:47 UTC
Um how exactly would a software ramdisk help AVS performance, which is already 100% run in system memory?
RAM disks only affect programs with lots of disk operations and swapping. I.e., not AVS.
Most likely, installing the ram disk driver changed some settings around which improved performance of your memory (which would mean it was badly configured in the first place).
petey1434
8th July 2004 17:43 UTC
nope
partly its because I listen to Ministry of sound, and all those files are at least 70 mb. Despite my best efforts winamp will not load more than 10 megs at a time, and just keep reading from the hard drive. :P Or my windows install has a cronic problem of never running a whole anything in ram. It does increase responsiveness. I can tell just by the seek times when fast forwarding through a 120 meg mp3. Before i had to wait up to 5 seconds before the sound would kick back in, now its instantanious. Same thing with video, more dramitic with video even. The only thing that doesnt get accelerated so far is the sample windows media HD trailers. They still lag like hell, i though it was that my Drive couldnt read fast enough but I guess not, its just poor encoding or crappy codec i guess.
petey1434
8th July 2004 17:51 UTC
ps
and I take offense to the "poorly configured memory", My mem is Corsair Xms at 400 mhz, on what was previously the highest rated motherboard. Its not the memory, Its just that running the media as well as the program all in ram cuts out the hard drive completly. It does help, especially with large mp3s or video files. The hard drive read time lags the vis noticably compared to having the file on the ram disk, at least at reasonable resolutions. Its also nice to hav a library of media files in ramdisk, because you can fast forward or rewind or change files instantly. Which cuts down on lag cause by a hard drive seeking out the next file during a song change. And the changing of Presets is also much faster, because there is no load time from the hard drive. Don't go poo pooing my post :P, I never said it was a cure-all, I just said it helps.;) :p :D
Adasha
9th July 2004 13:17 UTC
A ramdisk will only help ease the load from the cpu when something is being dragged off the harddrive, so if you've got a very large file then yes its possible, but as ucd stated most of the time everything is resident in memory anyway.
Try playing a CD or listening to a radio station instead of some huge hard drive intensive file and you'll see the difference.
I do like ramdisks btw, it was one of the features that I really liked about amigas
UnConeD
9th July 2004 15:56 UTC
The hard drive read time lags the vis noticably compared to having the file on the ram disk, at least at reasonable resolutions. Its also nice to hav a library of media files in ramdisk, because you can fast forward or rewind or change files instantly. Which cuts down on lag cause by a hard drive seeking out the next file during a song change. And the changing of Presets is also much faster, because there is no load time from the hard drive. Don't go poo pooing my post :P, I never said it was a cure-all, I just said it helps.
Well this is something entirely different, and has nothing to do with AVS. For some reason your disk IO was messed up. You could have at least mentioned this in your original post. When I play huge MP3 files, AVS works just as well.
Oh and as far as 'offending' you: I made an objective comment about your configuration, I did not insult your mom.
petey1434
9th July 2004 16:24 UTC
:)
Yea, its a 4 month old windows install thats really cluttered from admin files for cs etc...And theres probably spy ware all over making my drive churn. On another note I would say this is psychoacoustical, but It feels like the sound is "punchy-er" compared to having it on the hard drive. Or my ears were in a different state of hearing or somthing. Am using Sennheiser HD-590's with a nice headroom phone amp! :D Has anyone used those m-audio audiophile sound cards? Or does anyone know about getting the most out of "consumer" quality stuff. If I can OC my vid card, I should dam well be able to do something to my sound card! lol:D