cache game rom/iso to ram new feature request

[nannoo]

I was trying to get Tetsunoko vs Capcom to run smoothly on my laptop, to cut a long story short I found that setting up a virtual disk in ram and copying the iso ram, then playing from there fixxed performance way beyond my expectations. The game now runs perfectly smooth with no slow downs or stuttering at all, imcluding sound.

I then found this fixxed problems I was having with other games.

the problem is I have to manually copy the game I want to play to my virtual drive before I can play, so it becomes a clunky process.

As this makes such a huge difference to the speed of emulation, can we have an option to cache iso to RAM (along with custom textures?) in dolphin?

This should be very easy to do, is fine on any system with 8GB+ RAM and makes a huge difference (I urge you to try it yourself, for me it makes dolphin the definitive way to play my wii games-possibly faster than the wii itself, and with games like tetsunoko vs capcom HD looks astounding)

Thanks to all those involved in dev so far, great job

[OatmealDome]

Perhaps you can write a batch script to automatically set up the RAM drive and copy the ISO to it?

[JosJuice]

Does this build improve your performance when not using a RAM disk? http://dl.dolphin-emu.org/prs/pr-2149-dolphin-latest-x64.7z

[KHg8m3r]

You should also try the latest dev builds. Your profile says you're using version 4. There have been so many improvements since stable 4

[JosJuice]

(11-09-2015, 04:52 AM)KHg8m3r Wrote: You should also try the latest dev builds. Your profile says you're using version 4. There have been so many improvements since stable 4

Yes, definitely. Don't bother testing the build I linked until you've tried a development build.

[nannoo]

(11-09-2015, 05:36 AM)JosJuice Wrote:

(11-09-2015, 04:52 AM)KHg8m3r Wrote: You should also try the latest dev builds. Your profile says you're using version 4. There have been so many improvements since stable 4

Yes, definitely. Don't bother testing the build I linked until you've tried a development build.

Just running the latest pf the site from a few days ago, havn't tried the dev version. unless the rom is explicitly cached to RAM I cant see that it would make any difference

Has anyone else tried this? it would be interesting to know if others experience the same benefit I did

[JosJuice]

(11-09-2015, 06:38 AM)nannoo Wrote: Just running the latest pf the site from a few days ago, havn't tried the dev version. unless the rom is explicitly cached to RAM I cant see that it would make any difference

It doesn't explicitly cache the disc image to RAM, but it contains a lot of other performance improvements. CPU emulation and disc access run in sequence, so improvements to either one will help if the performance of either is a problem. Also, if you want to test and compare the performance of the build I linked which does disc access in parallel instead, you will need to test a recent development version first so that you have a reference build with similar CPU emulation performance.

(11-09-2015, 06:38 AM)nannoo Wrote: Has anyone else tried this? it would be interesting to know if others experience the same benefit I did

Someone posted about it as a side note here: https://forums.dolphin-emu.org/Thread-mystic-speed-boost-from-self-built-version-on-linux

[nannoo]

thanks for the advice, I'll try a few builds and get back to you

[degasus]

To be honest, there should be no need to cache all of the disk. The original disk is very slow, much slower than our hard disks right now (both in terms of latency and throughput). So we "just" need to implement the asynchron behavior in a good way. This is in contrast with the custom texture path. There the GPU reads from shared memory which is *much* faster than accessing the disk. Waiting for the harddrive is by far to slow there.

[StripTheSoul]

Are we talking shader cache here? Because nothing else really produces stutters for me.