HiRes Texture Packs - Preload into RAM?

[icejiub]

I'm a user who's been running Dolphin on my old i7920 for quite a while, mostly using it to play Project M for Brawl. I don't have an SSD but I have plenty of RAM, more than enough to store the Hi-Res Texture packs in memory.

Upon first bootup of PM, dolphin always waits until the texture is actually SHOWN to pull it from the harddrive, or at least thats what it looks like from my end, seeing as how I got a performance increase from swapping out an aging hard drive for a new one that hadn't a few years of crunchyness to it. EVERY SINGLE TIME it sees a new texture it has to run to the HDD, grab it, and replace it.

Since an SSD is out of budget for me at the moment, I tried making a ram disk, put the textures there, and linked it to the Load Folder. When I got in game, all the stuttering that would happen whenever dolphin would need to grab a texture was completely gone.

Reserving a gig or so of ram is kind of impractical, would it be possible for dolphin to have this feature integrated if it doesn't get in the way of other projects? Maybe have some preset amounts of memory that could be reserved as some texture packs are much larger than Brawl/PM's which is only 144 MB.

Hell, it'd be cool if certain Textures, like UI textures, could be made to be preloaded, while others stream from the disk normally.

[King Dude]

(10-02-2014, 01:41 AM)icejiub Wrote: I'm a user who's been running Dolphin on my old i7920 for quite a while, mostly using it to play Project M for Brawl. I don't have an SSD but I have plenty of RAM, more than enough to store the Hi-Res Texture packs in memory.

Upon first bootup of PM, dolphin always waits until the texture is actually SHOWN to pull it from the harddrive, or at least thats what it looks like from my end, seeing as how I got a performance increase from swapping out an aging hard drive for a new one that hadn't a few years of crunchyness to it. EVERY SINGLE TIME it sees a new texture it has to run to the HDD, grab it, and replace it.

Since an SSD is out of budget for me at the moment, I tried making a ram disk, put the textures there, and linked it to the Load Folder. When I got in game, all the stuttering that would happen whenever dolphin would need to grab a texture was completely gone.

Reserving a gig or so of ram is kind of impractical, would it be possible for dolphin to have this feature integrated if it doesn't get in the way of other projects? Maybe have some preset amounts of memory that could be reserved as some texture packs are much larger than Brawl/PM's which is only 144 MB.

Hell, it'd be cool if certain Textures, like UI textures, could be made to be preloaded, while others stream from the disk normally.

I don't have a RAM Disk, but I do have 8GB of RAM, and most modern computers have about 4GB of RAM. Hmm

[AnyOldName3]

The problem with the preload idea is that Dolphin doesn't generate the filename for the texture until it needs to display it, so the only option would be to load everything in the game's folder. As most textures won't be used most of the time, this would be wasteful.

[RachelB]

(10-02-2014, 07:10 AM)AnyOldName3 Wrote: The problem with the preload idea is that Dolphin doesn't generate the filename for the texture until it needs to display it, so the only option would be to load everything in the game's folder. As most textures won't be used most of the time, this would be wasteful.

That's not really a serious problem in 99% of cases.