Stream Mods from hard disk rather than load into memory.

[MR4Y]

XD there is no way your ram is slower than your hard drive. Ram is way, way faster- tens of gigabytes per second versus maybe 100-200 peak for a mechanical hard drive, and that figure drops if seeking around the platter.

Edit: Idea: Having to load from disk would be bad IMO but what about loading from a separate thread dedicated to holding the parts, textures, etc that aren't in use, basically a ramdisk? (That should be possible maybe and if hard drives are being considered anything would have to be better.) The problem with only loading what is being used is what happens if you build a rocket with so many unique parts you can't load them all at once? Do you drop down to super low-rez textures, do you somehow fetch each one in and out just in tome, I don't even know.

The problem is that the game is not dependant only of RAM. Just because RAM memory is generally faster, doesn't mean that the engine works perfectly for the intended purpose.

-First off, all the assets have to be copied to RAM. No matter how fast your RAM is, this takes time.

-Secondly, it's not possible to allocate all RAM just for KSP. We're not using DOS computers that can only load an app at a time.

-Even if it was possible to allocate all RAM for KSP, you're limited by the number of addresses x86 (32-bit) instructions can use.

-Your GPU uses the same adresses you RAM uses as well. Pretty much all devices with dedicated RAM do. So, if you have 4GB of RAM and a 2GB GPU, Windows would only see 2GB of usable RAM, but state you have 4GB, because all the memory addresses are being used. This was what cause IRQ conflicts in earlier OSes, especially Windows 95.

So, unless KSP is specifically engineered for people with SLC SSDs and performance RAM, the game is not optimized for your casual player and running from RAM is not a good solution.

[6.forty]

So, if you have 4GB of RAM and a 2GB GPU, Windows would only see 2GB of usable RAM, but state you have 4GB, because all the memory addresses are being used.

Onboard graphics typically reserve memory in this way, but a discrete card with its own RAM won't (not sure on the old Hypermemory/Turbocache cards). Windows will still share a portion of system RAM with the card, but it's essentially "just in case" and not explicitly reserved for the GPU. A modern day, automatic AGP aperture pretty much.

[MR4Y]

Onboard graphics typically reserve memory in this way, but a discrete card with its own RAM won't (not sure on the old Hypermemory/Turbocache cards). Windows will still share a portion of system RAM with the card, but it's essentially "just in case" and not explicitly reserved for the GPU. A modern day, automatic AGP aperture pretty much.

Yes, forget about the video card thing. I was wrong. x86 Windows can address exactly 4GB of memory not 3. The upper 512MB is used for HW address mapping, the location that the kernel uses to map HW memory space for DMA / communication. This isn't actually memory just address space, so even if you had 1GB of memory installed, Windows would still use the 3.5 -> 4.0 region for HW mapping.

Edited January 10, 2014 by MR4Y

[austincurr]

The problem is that the game is not dependant only of RAM. Just because RAM memory is generally faster, doesn't mean that the engine works perfectly for the intended purpose.

-First off, all the assets have to be copied to RAM. No matter how fast your RAM is, this takes time.

-Secondly, it's not possible to allocate all RAM just for KSP. We're not using DOS computers that can only load an app at a time.

-Even if it was possible to allocate all RAM for KSP, you're limited by the number of addresses x86 (32-bit) instructions can use.

-Your GPU uses the same adresses you RAM uses as well. Pretty much all devices with dedicated RAM do. So, if you have 4GB of RAM and a 2GB GPU, Windows would only see 2GB of usable RAM, but state you have 4GB, because all the memory addresses are being used. This was what cause IRQ conflicts in earlier OSes, especially Windows 95.

So, unless KSP is specifically engineered for people with SLC SSDs and performance RAM, the game is not optimized for your casual player and running from RAM is not a good solution.

First, before I get started, do you realize you just said Random Access Memory memory?

Anyway, I'm not sure what you're talking about now. I was replying to:

[quote name=jwenting;898462

My RAM is a lot faster than my hard disk' date=' to have to wait a minute whenever I click something in the VAB or it comes into view anywhere, and that's what would happen, would be an unacceptable burden.

Good for you. Unfortunately, we don't have the same hardware you have.

As for your points, The whole point of what I'm saying is that it takes time to copy to ram, and we need to be trying to make this the least annoying possible and yet not run into the 32 bit limit. Second: Okay really? When did I say that? I do not have and have never had DOS (side note- "Back in the day, there was no "app" business. it was an application or it was nothing!") and I know perfectly well that more than one thing can be done at once. My computer can do four! (Of course if we can fudge it and say if it seems like it is, that's a different story. ) Although I didn't explicitly say so, I obviously recognized that the 32 bit limit was there when I was suggesting putting more data into the ram(In a different thread), since you can't really do that if it's completely full... My GPU does NOT use the same DDR3 memory as my CPU. It uses a gigabyte of GDDR5. As for ram, I believe 4GB should be supported but you shouldn't expect great performance, 8 should be enough, and any more won't provide much more benefit. I do not have an ssd at all, single level or otherwise, so you can't be talking about me. Performance ram? I run at 1600mhz currently, the norm for DDR3. Missed again. I'm all for being able to play on low-spec computers, but to do so expect to turn everything down to low and don't download a crap ton of mods. Running from ram is what some tiny linux distros do. Why? So that hard drive swapping or reading from disc doesn't slow you down. By the way, if there's too much in ram it goes to the hard drive anyway, so what's the problem, right? Nighty night folks, I'm tired.