Would it seem a as a good idea to use a program such as ramcache for a fairly new pc?

Searching the internet provides a lot of answer in the range of It won't do anything to you can hurt your performance when trying

Still i wondered about why would such a program exist and why would a company known for its gaming hardware speciality release such a program under their name ( it is rog strix ramcache III )

With some days under my belt on a 32 gig 2060super system without any prior measurements, no baseline, just my gut feeling i can say that it does seem to fasten several games such as total war, be it used from the m.2 i'm running or the SSD and even the HDD. With other games i don't seem to recognize a lot happening. I tried increasing the size of the ramcache from the 2 gb, which is recommended, to 4gb but that did seem to have a negative impact on the system i'm running. Still, maybe i should have given the system a couple of days to get used to other use of ram load.

There was one post found online containing some calculation how a 64 gig system running a titan fx card would actually almost need the use of the entire memory size to work in a most optimal state. Now my 2060 is nothing compared to a titan though on the other hand 8 gb of ddr6 memory could in theory be the same as 20 gb's of ddr4 memory? which maybe even a better way of showing my stupidity on this topic then anything else!

Do you work with this or similar kind of software with succes? Does anyone know if this is only is recommended for the systems containing way more memory then my does?

Most modern OS I think do some background filesystem caching. I wouldn't bother messing with that.

If you have a decent SSD, then RAMDisks generally aren't worth it for gaming. First of all, you need to copy the game from disc into RAMDisk in the first place, which often takes as much time as loading it (actually more if you count the "human time" of setting it up and pre-loading it). Secondly, whenever you access any file Windows loads it into the Windows File Cache anyway. So when you copy a file from SSD to RAMDisk, you're actually making two copies : 1. Into the RAMDisk and 2. Into the Windows File Cache. And Windows always looks at the latter first. Meaning a lot of the benefit you think you're gaining from the RAMDisk comes more from Windows simply "reading" the game folder before starting it rather than the actual RAMDisk.

So if your game uses only 4GB RAM, and you copied the files somewhere before starting it, then Windows will be holding it all in RAM anyway not due to the RAMDisk but due to caching it in the process of making a copy. You could even do something involving a "read without copy" like a CRC check on the game folder (without any RAMDisk) and they'd still be cached into RAM (Windows File Cache) the same way. This is visible the most on laptops with slow 5,400rpm mechanical drives and measuring "cold" (first start) start time, then quit, then restart it and measure "warm" (second startup time). So a lot of the benefits that RAMDisk's should provide actually gets wasted. And for increasingly bloated +50GB games it's a pointless never-ending rat-race vs buying a fast SSD and starting them directly off that.

A blast from the past. Let it stay in the past.

Considering most mid-tier SSDs already use a RAM cache internally, I'd say no. Even low end PCIe SSDs use HMB to borrow some of your system RAM and treat it as a cache. The idea only works well when implemented in hardware at this point.

Ha! Gotta love the marketing BS on this thing. How about just being fine with those oh-so-long-lasting miliseconds and keep your RAM free for actually useful stuff, eh?

Generally speaking, no. The RAM taken up by such a cache would reduce the amount available for your programs, which would cause them to be swapped out to disk more often, with the real possibility of performance being reduced overall.

As others have noted, Windows itself will cache data read from disk into RAM (and has done so since Windows for Workgroups 3.11 back in 1993) and this cannot be disabled, so a ramcache program would duplicate this, resulting in multiple copies of disk data being held in RAM.

However, there are exceptions to any rule.

If you have far more RAM than you'd ever use normally, then a RAMdisk can help boost performance if you use it for the most commonly accessed data, e.g. Windows pagefile, temporary files. If you use SSDs, a ramdisk can reduce writes to them and extend their lifespan. And it can improve your privacy since data on a ramdisk will go for good when you restart your system (whereas with SSDs, due to their wear leveling, it's almost impossible to securely delete data).

If you have RAM that is not normally accessible (e.g. more than 3.25GB on a 32-bit version of Windows) then a RAM cache that can access such memory (such as PrimoCache, which can use PAE to access up to 64GB on 32-bit systems) can boost performance - it will still duplicate the data in Windows' own file cache, but can (a) hold more data; (b); retain cached data regardless of program requirements (Windows' cache will shrink to give priority to programs, losing cached data in the process) and (c) cache data that would not normally be cached (some games and benchmarks can bypass Windows file caching).

Unless your system falls into that quite specific category though, ram cache software is probably no more use than painting a red "go faster" stripe on your PC case.

now don't tell me you are someone who in general would recommend 16 gb's of ram for a modern day system now would you? well, most do seem to recommend only 16 gb's of ram for any system, now you are telling me that with 32 gb's i'm in danger of slowing down my system if i take 2 gb's for ramcache?

You need to check what your maximum RAM usage is first. On older versions of WIndows, you can use Task Manager and add together the Peak Commit Charge and System Cache figures - ideally at the end of the day to ensure you reach maximum utilisation - to see how much of that 32GB you have to spare.

With Windows 10, Task Manager seems to have been gimped so you need to use other utilities to find out this figure. Process Hacker has a Performance summary providing that information. RAMMap is a Microsoft (SysInternals) utility that should offer similar information.

Once you know your maximum (+ cache) usage, add a couple of gigs to that to give you a safety margin and subtract this from your total RAM to give you a figure that you can consider using for RAM disks or RAM caches, without adversely affecting application performance. In your position, I would suggest using a RAMdisk first, for page/temp files - there are several available but Primo Ramdisk seems to be the most fully-featured (and will work with PrimoCache if you still want a ram cache).

The main downside is that both Primo Ramdisk and Primo Cache require online activation.

If you're expecting to play modern AAA titles, yes, I am. We are at the point where W10 + a modern game may take up more than 8GB of RAM.

Getting back to Ramcache - if you want to use it and see any benefit in using it, go ahead. As others have said, any decent modern OS, whether it's Linux or Windows 10 will actively leverage unused system RAM as an I/O cache anyway, but the process is reactive, not proactive. If you feel that you need to pre-load some games into RAM to gain several seconds of load time at most, nobody is stopping you.

I just don't see the point of it to be honest. It's like you're on a space ship going 0.9999997x the speed of light and you're asking if it's worth pushing it to 0.9999998x.

Hey you could cache Windows and the drivers and the game and all, you just need a motherboard that has at least eight RAM slots and then you filll those up with 32GiB modules, like these: https://www.gskill.com/products/1/165/Desktop-Memory.

lol no don't even go there, do you know how many times i will spend in loading screens in total war switching from one fight to another and back to the main map.....
sound

I'll be honest, Ramcache is just a leftover from a bygone era. Even in Linux there's not much point in having it these days, where they format for swapspace by default.

^ That stuff is mostly just marketing and the problem isn't that were "using old information", rather that SSD's have significantly changed the situation. ASUS's benchmarks when using 5,400rpm HDD's will show a dramatic improvement. But with SSD's not only are they much faster themselves, they also have far larger RAM caches inside them. Eg, today I have a 2TB MX500 that comes with a sizable 2GB DRAM cache that already does exactly the same thing at exactly the same capacity but without eating up any actual RAM. And Windows will still be caching stuff in unused RAM on top of that. Adding a 3rd layer of cache doesn't make much difference.

Example - we can already see 4x increase in benchmark speeds comparing SATA SSD's (550MB/s) to NVMe (+2GB/s) SSD's, so games must load 4x faster right? Here's how they scale in the real world:-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V3AMz-xZ2VM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YWtspZqOxAM

RAMDisks are even more into the realms of "depreciating gains" due to how games work - they'll request a chunk of data, unpack it into RAM, initialize some stuff, then request the next bit. They don't behave remotely like a synthetic CrystalDiskMark pure Sequential read speed test, and there's a whole lot of marketing selling ultra-premium Real Gamer (tm) branded stuff that promises you'll "feel" the difference based on blind number chasing 10x more than you actually will.

I think the problem is, most non AAA games don't use anywhere near 32GB and people who've bought themselves a ton of RAM often end up trying to find stuff to fill it up with, hoping that RAM acceleration software will make more of a difference that it does. The biggest beneficiaries of 32GB tend to be productivity (eg, video editing, databases, etc) rather than GOG games. The biggest beneficiaries of NVMe vs SATA SSD's tends to be 4K video editing / productivity more than games. And the biggest beneficiaries of RAMDisks tends to be database servers and "live boot" or virtualized OS's more than consumer game load times that are already being read from an SSD which reads faster than the games typically request chunks of data in a non-continuous manner.