A closer look at DimmDrive on Steam

With the Steam Summer Sale going on, I thought it was a good opportunity to bring up DimmDrive, the Steam RamDrive creation tool. I’ve had DimmDrive installed for a few months and have been using it on Shroud of the Avatar which is currently in development. The machine I’m using it on has 32GB of ram with a 24GB ram drive and the entire contents of SotA loaded into memory. That should be an indication that you need a lot of ram and a higher end machine. I’ve seen a lot of reviews from people with mid-range machines and 8GB of ram and that’s just not going to work for you. Putting this on an “older” system or a “laptop” isn’t going to make it run like new. I will say that my experience has been quite positive. Like I said, I loaded SotA entirely into ram and scenes load quicker and I’m able to enter a new area quicker […]

A peek at Process Lasso, and is Free really, free?

I don’t have Process Lasso installed, nor have I ever used it. But you can’t read a review about DimmDrive or CPU Cores without seeing that name pop up time and time again, and almost always within a negative Steam review. It comes across as the Holy Grail of computer tuning and since it’s free, it’s the only tool you need. Of course, I had to check it out. What features do you get for free and how free is free? Process Lasso does come with a sweet set of features to balance processor usage, control ram usage, CPU affinity and process optimization as well as gaming profiles. I have to agree, those are the same features in CPU Cores and Core Tuner and the product is free, so why bother with a paid product? Free is fleeting and many features of Process Lasso are available for a limited time only. After the 30 day trial, the following are disabled: […]

Improving Game Performance with DimmDrive

I brought up the idea of using a Ramdrive to speed up games a few months ago, so with the big Steam sale, I decided to get DimmDrive and try it out. The main focus was to improve load times for Shroud of the Avatar, which is still in pre-alpha and hasn’t been through the optimization process. As the name suggests, you need a fair amount of ram to see an improvement. I’ve got 32GB installed on my gaming machine so it seems right for the task. The specs look like this: AMD FX 8350 at 4Ghz, 32GB Ram, GTX 660, 1.5TB Western Digital drive with no SSD. So here we go. Installing DimmDrive was easy, just like any other app from Steam. Like a game, you Launch DimmDrive to get your config screen, which shows the games you have installed (not everything in your library) that can be copied into memory and how big of a ram drive you […]

Anyone have experience with this new product called DimmDrive?

I was just browsing through Steam and up popped a new "memory management" tool called DimmDrive, which integrates with Steam and allows you to run games (or portions of a game) in a Ram Drive. Ram Drives are by no means a new idea, but this is geared towards games and decreasing their load times. All right, I’m totally intrigued. As I’ve written before, my game rig is an 8-core AMD FX8350 with 32GB of ram and it’s pretty damn fast already. It has regular spindle drives with no SSD, so I wonder if I could squeeze out some more speed with DimmDrive? I’ve been reading through a few forums and I’m not playing first person shooters, but rather racing games like Dirt 2/3, Next Car Game, Assetto Corsa and Grid Autosport. There is also my new favorite, Shroud of the Avatar. Will I see a performance boost in these games? Games work quite well now and I have no […]