Fastest Loading Times Ever?

[Commander Gizmo]

In an effort to speed up SH's loading time, I set out to test a virtual ram drive to see what difference it might make. For those of you that aren't geeks like me, a virtual ram drive means using part of your system's fastest memory as a virtual, or fake, hard drive where files can be loaded from. That means the fastest possible rate at which the game can grab the files.

For those that are interested, here are my results so far:

The Test System
CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 (3GHz)
Mem: 8GB OCZ Reaper DDR2-1066 4-4-4-12 @ T1 timing
Mainboard: DFI BloodIron P35-T2RL (Duel Memory Channels)
Video Card: PCIE 1.0 x16 EVGA GeForce 9800 GTX 512MB (Overclocked)
OS Drive: OCZ Core SSD SATA3
Game Drive: Samsung HD501LJ SATA3 7200RPM 16MB cache
OS: Vista x64 Ultimate custom bulid + fine tuned for SSD w/no caching or paging file whatsoever.

Obviously my gaming system is a bit faster than some of the ones you guys have mentioned using, so my base times are a bit over the top already. You'll just have to take the results and guesstimate what it might do for your system.


SH3 Mods
GWX3.0
PT SoundPack V3.2cg
Large Gramophone Library (shouldn't matter since they aren't preloaded)
CA's Offericer Icons
Integrated Orders
Aces Hi Res Uniforms & Medals MK II
Church Obs Periscope (customized slightly)
Community Units
St Naz and Schluese & Other Units
Seafloor SF V3 Final
Thomsen's Ships V4.1
Waterstream + Exaust Combi V2.3
Torpedo Damage Final V2
OLC's Modified Searchlight Beams
M.E.P v2
Anzacmick's Damage Immersion
SH3Speech (heavily customized)
High Res Skins for IXB (switched as desired)
Many various minor graphics and other changes that do not effect file size.


Career Used
Patrol: At sea during patrol 6.
Boat: IXB
Port: Lorient


Folder Access List
According to my debugging software, SH3 accesses files for loading from the following folders while loading this saved game. The same saved game was used for each test.

• Sound
• Textures
• Air
• Campaigns
• Crew
• Env
• Interior
• Land
• Markings (no custom markings here!)
  
• menu
• Misc
• Movies
• Objects
• Sea
• SingleMissions
• Submarine
• Terrain

These folders total 3.457 GB on my system. The game appears to only load 1.9GB of data to the system RAM and according to the file access list, this is about right. (Most texture data is placed in the video card and does not appear to be doubled in system RAM.) Most of the files in these folders are not loaded, especially the sound folder where only some of the most commonly used sound effects are preloaded. Only one single mission is loaded (why?), while the single movie seems entirely unnecessary since it is only used on the main menu. Sea, Terrain, and interior seem to make up the bulk of the size with Sea coming in at an incredible 1.6GB all on it's own.


The Test
I created a 4GB virtual memory drive on my system and then transferred the above listed folders into it. Using NTFS junction points, I redirected my data folder from SH3's install drive to the virtual ram drive. The game would now get all the data to load the career directly from the system memory rather than a hard drive. It should be noted that all prefetching (including superfetch) along with the paging file have been entirely disabled. I only timed the career loading as it is fairly simple to speed up the main menu screen loading and it is already plenty fast enough. Each time was from the moment of pressing 'yes' at the load screen to the moment the "Not so long ago..." disappeared.


The Results
As stated above, my test results are probably a bit less impressive than on a less optimized system. Mine is very heavily optimized and extremely fast as that is what I do for a living. I used the same saved game for each loading of the career. I also ran 5 tests of each scenario and averaged the times. That didn't prove necessary though as the game loaded with the exact same time in each scenario all 5 attempts. (Can I build a stable system or what?) Here are the results of the test.

• Standard SATA Drive: 2:34:057
• SSD SATA Drive: 2:22:567
  
• Virtual Ram Drive: 2:08:324

The Review
Yep, that's right. I saved a whopping 26 seconds by loading directly from memory. Hardly worth setting aside 4GB of the systemmemory (that's half folks) just to load a game a smidge faster. On the other hand, 2:34 is a scream'n fast loading time for SH3+GWX in my opinion. On a system with a slower drive or a less optimized setup I can imagine a much greater improvement. As it stands, even with my severely overclocked and ultra wide memory bus I was unable to achieve a massive increase in loading time over my standard SATA hard drive.


Future Tests?
I might find the time to install this massive game and spend the 12 hours it takes to set it up properly on one of my other systems that is a bit less optimized. That is, if there is any interest at all to begin with. Anyone who has the expertise to set up a virtual ram drive probably has a ton of memory and an optimized system, yes?

Please post your feedback, if any. I'm curious if any of this is even of interest to the folks in these parts. If anyone feels like timing their load times and posting them here it might make for some interesting comparisons.