Load Performance Idea

[Carl]

I just had an idea and wondered what others would think. In my machine the biggest bottleneck in loading the Sims 3 is the hard drive. I am thinking that next time I clean up my PC, I will install the base game on a separate drive from my expansions, since it does ask after all where you'd like to install them. It seems interesting, because multiple things must be called to load at once from the separate folders and the drives could theoretically work simultaneously. My drives are quite old, several generations behind, and standard 7200 rpm. Anything like this could help. I think it would be especially helpful with World Adventures travel.

Maybe someone else will get around to trying this idea before I do. I don't think the installs need be on the same drive, but I could be wrong.

[TGBlank]

Several expansions on different drives <- no help, only the latest expansion exe/files is loaded, and even tho some localized and world data is loaded from the other expansions, it's really minimal.

Game and documents folder on different drives <- THAT would help. The cache files, the store items, screenshots, videos, saves and the like all go into the documents folder (normally on C, under my documents, for windows). If that and the game/expansions are separated, you *could* see an improvement.

Best solution would be to just have 12~30 gigs of ram and installing the whole thing on a ramdisk. Annoying if and whenever you have to power off the machine (requires either full copying of the whole game + expansions or reinstalling), but optimal performance otherwise.

[Carl]

I always install games on a different drive from windows. It really does make a difference. With some games you can just export the registry and reinstall them that way should you wipe.  It's nice, but I haven't got to try it with the Sims yet. I'm not sure I'd want to though.

At least we did accomplish informing someone of that should they be installing and have a second drive. The default to C isn't so hot in that case.

I didn't realize that not much was loaded from the various folders. Thanks for the info.