Readyboost Gaming?

Hey there,

I have a 4GB Memory Stick Pro Duo to connect to my M11x via the card reader slot. I've heard both sides of the argument. Has anyone done any tests or found any that prove one side or the other? Does readyboost increase or decrease frames per second? If it increases, then how much space is too much before it starts hindering your system more than anything else. Just curious.


Thanks for any information,
DeeVu.

P.S. I believe it is also possible to partition your Hard drive, to lets say maybe 2-4GB and use it as readyboost as well. I haven't tried it. But would that work better than a memory stick pro duo? Any thoughts.

 

I dont see you getting better FPS, but probably not much of a drop.
the ready boost is slower than 7200 rpm virtual mem.

 

Hmmm, If that is the case then I guess readyboost is another useless device used to fool the common man. Guess my camcorder has two memory sticks to go through now.

 

From what i read about readyboost is that its pointless, and people have gotten on average a 10 fps drop using this.

 

Yeah, I've heard similar. But I've heard that some computers gain from it. I'm assuming from the information you just gave that these are probably older model computers.

 

even if it was from an older computer, it shouldnt effect the Fps drop all to much. youll still have a drop.

 

I think its a waste too. I see an increase in cpu usage when I use it in my desktop. And when you think about it, most usb/memory cards get no more than 30-40 mb/s transfer. Compare that to your actual ddr3 ram, when clocked in at 800mhz it offers 6400 mb/s. And probably better latency

 

From what I've collected as a common opinion is that readyboost isn't worth thinking about if you already have 4 gb RAM. You'll only really see an improvement if your system is frequently exceeding the physical RAM and using the pagefile for active tasks. Since your games should not use more than 4 gb of physical RAM, I doubt it would be of any help.

But, if you're curious, try it out. You really don't have anything to lose. I imagine results could very well vary game to game.

Regarding partitioning your hdd, I see that as no different than the page file, so I see that as a dead end, perhaps unless it's an ssd. Although internal drive transfer speeds are faster than memory cards, your hdd is already being used to read game files and using for both would result in reduced performance to do either.

 

This is my understanding as well. The only benefit from Readyboost would be when your computer would otherwise be writing to the harddisk paging file.

 

My experience with readyboost on my last laptop is that the CPU usage associated with USB access nullified any benefit.

If i remember correctly ready boost writes where pretty small and random, point was flash being faster than disk access but still much slower than ram access. Point is 4GB of ready boost isn't a replacement for any amount of decent ram. Though only more recent (year or two) machines really offer the ram capacity to go past 4gb.

I would have todo some testing again to see if I could find any benifit with my newer setup but i have my doubts.

Windows wont even allow you. Unless its an SSD the chances of access times passing the test will prevent you from even trying. You want "more performance" using the hard drive you would only find it in increase the page file size. Once you start benefiting from that you have actual performance issues.

The page file or virtual memory does a couple of things. First it keeps a copy of everything in ram, so that when space is needed for a higher priority process instead of moving it out of ram it can just allocated the ram space to a process right away. When that less important data is requested from ram you have a page miss, in which it then tries to pull from the page file (we will assume it was successful, otherwise it has to pull data from files or even generate an error) while decreasing overall performance its a necessary evil. Once ram actually fills up the page file can also store extra data for active processes that cant be stored in ram.