Far from nonsense, that actually does work. But for the humble doom2.wad nowadays (~14mb), the speed difference now is so negligeable with the advent of SSD's that it makes no real tangible difference. And even if you're still stuck with the old platter spindle hard disks, they also sped up so much before they were effectively replaced with SSD's that even then, the difference isn't that great for a file that small.It was even suggested that simply copying your doom.wad before running the game would help cache it into memory. I suspect that was nonsense.
The reason why it might not seem that effective though, is there are some external factors that can affect how effective it is - i.e. if something else quickly replaces the cache (being RAM starved, for example).
This trick still works well for modestly larger mods (i.e. in the 300mb to 700mb range), and if you have a ton of ram in your system you probably can even chunk 2gb and 3gb files into the RAM cache this way too.
This isn't a myth - but again, it really depends on how quickly the cache gets replaced. If you run it for a long period of time and alt-tab out often and run other stuff in the background, it probably will be evicted from cache relatively quickly. But there's nothing stopping you from running a batch file in the background to do copy /b c:\path\to\file.wad nul and then sleep 600 (if you have that command installed on your computer) between each copy, to ensure that it stays in ram effectively forever (or at least until you close that command prompt window).
Statistics: Posted by Rachael — Mon Feb 03, 2025 10:43 pm