Anyone tried 'FancyCache'

[Parrotnut]

My system only uses ~3.8 GB RAM, of the 12 GB, when I'm playing railworks. This weekend I found a program called “FancyCache” and couldn't resist to try it out. After a couple of minutes driving a route I started to see some improvements with
‘Tile loading’, probably because it’s now read from the cache ( RAM ) instead of the disk. The second time I played the same route everything feels smoother, the whole route is now probably read from RAM instead of the hard disk.
Your mileage may very of course, I’m still trying out different settings but it feels smoother to drive a scenario with this caching. And every bit improvement is welcome I suppose.

It’s beta software and you can try it out 90 days, after that 90 days you continue using it by updating or download an extended trial license.
A warning though, If you want to try it out: when Defer-Write is enabled, a power outage or system failure might result in data loss or corruption.

So, if you have plenty of RAM maybe you can use it for caching.

How it works: http://www.romexsoftware.com/en-us/fancy-cache/
User Guide ( and some important warnings ) : http://www.romexsoftware.com/en-us/fanc ... /help.html

Regards,

Frank

[SaMa1]

What are your settings with the program? Are you using Volume or Disks edition? I tested the program with default settings on this computer with 12 gigs and it didn't load the route to cache(according to the Performance statistics tool provided with the program, it listed only 6 megs of cached data)

Edit: Okay, I tried the program again and magically the Oxford Paddington route loaded in 10 seconds and was stutter free to the point I had driven in first time. Based on this observation I would say that the program needs to load its data to cache first, therefor you don't see much improvement at first time you drive the route, but second time you will. I believe you can load the whole route to cache with going through the map with map editor(Ctrl-E). Interesting program to say the least.)

[tofwings]

This looks very interesting, will have to check it out.

Thanks for posting .

Brian

[Parrotnut]

What are your settings with the program? Are you using Volume or Disks edition? I tested the program with default settings on this computer with 12 gigs and it didn't load the route to cache(according to the Performance statistics tool provided with the program, it listed only 6 megs of cached data)

Edit: Okay, I tried the program again and magically the Oxford Paddington route loaded in 10 seconds and was stutter free to the point I had driven in first time. Based on this observation I would say that the program needs to load its data to cache first, therefor you don't see much improvement at first time you drive the route, but second time you will. I believe you can load the whole route to cache with going through the map with map editor(Ctrl-E). Interesting program to say the least.)

Hello SaMa1

I’m using the Disk version. My disks are not partitioned
Indeed, the first time you run a route you don’t see much improvement, it needs to be in the cache first. You can see a improvement the first time when you switch cam views a couple of times, they are almost instant.

My settings ( for now ) :

Disk 0 ( C: Windows )

Algorithm : LFU-R
Cache Size : 1024
Caching Strategy: Read/Write
Defer Write enabled, latency set to 60 Sec. ( My SSD’s don’t support ‘TRIM’, so with this setting, Fancy-Cache is doing the garbage deleting even before it is written to the SSD’s, if I understand it correctly )

Disk 1 ( D: programs/Games )
Cache size 6000, the rest the same as Disk 0

My guess is that people with regular hard disks see the most improvement with the stuttering.



@ Brian, you're very welcome, hope you see some improvement also.

Regards, Frank

[trainsmit]

With partionen disk drives I have chosen the volume edition. I have used read only caching, since NT is pretty good at deferring writes.

Level-1: 128MB, cache in 4kB blockls, LRU and read-only.
Level-2: 3072 MB, Invisible memory, MBU.

2.4 GHz Core 2 Quad 8GB, gtx560 1GB, WinXP x86 SP3, using boot.ini: /noexecute=optin /fastdetect /PAE /3GB /userva=2560 /nodebug /nolowmem

Now, what would be instering are two things:

1) An agreement among route and scenarios creators never to use more than 3 GB of assets.
2) A small utility to preload ALL the required game, content and assets files into the cache prior to launching the sim.

Maybe RSC could bundle a dedicated RAM driver and cache util and a super fancy analyser to hint creators at how to slim their creation. Latter could be a product in it own right serving as much needed cash-cow for the all important railway simulation development.

[Gishank]

Whilst I personally like the idea of the program I'd rather not have to use a completely seperate thing to get what I'd consider basic functionality in a 'game'/'simulator'. I honestly think that Railworks by default, should cache data itself to allow for quick-loading. Near enough every normal game out there does it (even indie ones) so I can't understand why RW3 doesn't have it already.