AMD has posted a blog on their website announcing a partnership with Dataram, a developer of RAMDisk software that should dramatically speed up gaming. By using Ramdisk software you can reserve a part of your super fast RAM memory. Once enabled you can access it like a physical disk in your system and it also gets a drive letter assigned. AMD claims that the software is able read data at an amazing speed of 25 GB per second and that the RAMdrive is 1700% faster than a HDD.
While we don't question the performance increase, it's important to be aware of the fact that using a RAMdrive will decrease the total system memory. Therefor it should only be used in systems with a decent amount of RAM. Another drawback of RAMdrives is that in case of a reboot or power failure, the entire disk is emptied.
RAMdrives have been available for ages but have never been really popular due to the mentioned limitations and because the relative low amount of space available, even in modern systems. Still if you want to try it, you can get a free trial from AMD which allows you to allocate up to 4GB of RAM. If you have AMD Radeon memory then you'll be able to allocate 6 GB. If you're willing to spend $20, then you can buy the AMD Radeon RAMDisk Xtreme application which allows you to allocate up to 64GB.
We'd love to hear your experiences with this software, so please share!
