RAMDisk for performance boost in gaming?

Solution 1:

If you have the spare ram, it is definitely worth it to dedicate some of it to a ramdisk. I have an 8 Gb ramdisk for my computer. I also have a 60 gb OCZ Vertex 3 SSD. The Ramdisk (although severely limited in storage) is 70-100x faster than my ssd in some areas. My ssd has seq read/write speeds of ~11000 mb/s and ~14000 mb/s respectively. If you were to install a game onto my Ramdisk, it would load pretty much instantly (an exception would be a part where you need to log in). I play a game called "War Thunder". It took an average of 30 seconds to 1 minute to launch to the login screen, and then another 30 seconds to load the graphics engine and get to the "hangar" where planes are displayed. I dragged the game onto the RamDisk and it launched to the login screen in 4 seconds, logged in in 10, and entered the hanger 5 seconds later.

TL;DR Anything you can put on a ramdrive will open dozens of times faster than a identical game on a SSD. This is certainly true, unless the game is relying on a server to acquire large amounts of information. At this point, you need to wait for the server.

Solution 2:

This would help with things like map and texture load, as opposed to rendering. The problem is, you need to get the map/texture information onto the RAM drive and also point the game at it. Essentially, you would need to install the game onto the RAM drive every single time you booted your computer. Why does it not help beyond map loading etc? Because game developers are already optimizing the game based on RAM. A game will load as much into memory as it needs to provide a good user experience. Swapping to the hard drive is ideally minimized to only those occasions where absolutely necessary, or at points that don't impact the player too much. Truly exceptional programs will pull this off seamlessly where you don't even notice the swapping. So, a RAM drive could help if you want to hassle with it, and you have a game that doesn't have a large texture/map pack that can fit on RAM, while leaving enough RAM available to for running the actual game.

tl;dr - Get a solid-state drive.