How To Speed Up Football Manager, Add More Leagues, Better Gameplay

[rcoobc]

I've posted this elsewhere but anyway, this is probably the first genuinely helpful thing I've done for the FM Community. I was wondering how to speed up Football Manager and I got on the idea of using a ramdisk. So I looked up some tutorials and found this one, creating a ramdisk, but not in the way I would have thought to have done it.

So I thought I would try to see if this tutorial: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zrecoX2nsOM&feature=player_embedded does increase the performance of football manager, it does, massively. I'm on a 3 year old laptop that came with Vista but I put windows 7 on it (the tutorial is for windows 7 but it might work with Vista and there will be similar ones for xp), that has 3 gigabytes of ram.

I allocated just over 1.5 gigabytes of ram for the ramdisk, leaving less than 1.5 gigabytes for the rest (this is where I think vista might have a bit more trouble), and the performance increase was easily noticeable. Whereas before I could just about play RTC's 11.3 level 11 database on small database with no other leagues added, now I'm playing it on medium database with other leagues added as well, and instead of 10's of minutes waiting, I'm waiting for less than a minute between loading.

It also stops Football Manager stealing all the computers resources making other things run much slower (I think).

I'll do some tests to conclusively prove this another time, for now I just thought I'd share the news.

[roi men]

Works good for me... thanks!

even though I have good PC, sometimes the 3rd and 4th season are getting too slow..(even if I choose 2 leagues)

with this solution I have found it has positive effect and it does speed up the system a little

[Boroboy100]

I have watched numerous youtube videos on this and was really interested in using this....BUT I do not fully understand what it is/what it does. Can someone explain in idiots terms what it is and what it does please....and more importantly is it worth doing on a PC with Windows XP with 4 gig of RAM?

[TheHuss]

This is slightly off the topic but my searches are coming up with nothing and the title of the thread is close-ish. I've ported a savegame to my more powerful laptop that's come back from repairs and realised I'm only playing with a small database. I'm quite far in so really don't want to start again. My question is, is there any way at all, official or unofficial to increase the size of the database once a game's been started. I really, really hope so

[Neil Brock]

Please keep us updated, I'd be interested to see if this does make a difference. Thanks.

[FrazT]

This is slightly off the topic but my searches are coming up with nothing and the title of the thread is close-ish. I've ported a savegame to my more powerful laptop that's come back from repairs and realised I'm only playing with a small database. I'm quite far in so really don't want to start again. My question is, is there any way at all, official or unofficial to increase the size of the database once a game's been started. I really, really hope so

No- once the game ha started you are stuck with that database.

[TheHuss]

Nooo, but thanks for the reply, I was hoping more than anything

[Golaxi]

will it work good with windows vista? How does it work?

[markyosullivan]

There's got to be a catch with this thing. Does it end up making your CPU blow up?

[Boroboy100]

From my understanding of it....this basically makes your RAM perform as a HD? Is that correct? and because RAM is accessed FASTER then a HD, it means any program using your RAM to save Temp game files etc will run quicker??? Am I along the right lines of thinking here?

[Westfalenstadion4ever]

Testet it. Runs much more fluid. Have 6GB RAM. 3050MB RAMdisk. Would say speed increases from 10-50%.

[OJDD]

I think this is just a way to make a fast PC even more faster...

I tested it on my Notebook(Win7) having 2GB of RAM, I made a RAMdisk of 1GB. On one hand I've "won" 1GB of fast virtual memory, but on the other hand I've "lost" 1GB of physical memory.

In my case there's no noticeable speeding-up of FM... :-(

[x42bn6]

From my understanding of it....this basically makes your RAM perform as a HD? Is that correct? and because RAM is accessed FASTER then a HD, it means any program using your RAM to save Temp game files etc will run quicker??? Am I along the right lines of thinking here?

Pretty much, yes.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAM_disk

However, you will need a lot of RAM to do this, for obvious reasons.

Also, bear in mind that if you have more RAM, Windows will deliberately increase your RAM usage for caching purposes (i.e. if you start your system with 2 GB of RAM, your RAM usage will be higher than if it was 1 GB of RAM). So if you are, say, using 400 MB out of 1 GB of RAM, it does not make sense to occupy the remaining ~600 MB of RAM with, say, a Football Manager game, as it would arguably slow down your system more, and might even be faster if you just let Football Manager run normally.

I'm not sure how I/O-intensive Football Manager is (Neil Brock - perhaps you could elaborate?), except for saving and loading files, which would be stupidly-quick with a RAM disk. If it's not I/O-intensive, it's probably not going to help a great deal - certainly not if you don't have a lot of RAM (<2 GB I'd imagine).

A friend of a friend used to play World of Warcraft on his workplace's servers - which had basically whole "sheets" of RAM - hundreds of gigabytes of RAM. He could load up multiple sessions into RAM and the game was incredibly quick.

[rcoobc]

Sorry, I haven't even thought to check this recently. Yes, that is the idea, you make your computer think that part of the RAM is a hard drive. Useful if you have more RAM than your computer needs. I'm using a 3 year old laptop running windows 7, and I can safety put my pagecache file onto a ramdisk.

With virtual ramdisks you basically have a few options.

1) Create a ramdisk and install football manager onto your ramdisk drive.

2) Put your pagecache file onto a ramdisk (as seen in the video)

3) Put your appdata onto a pagecache file (a lot of work for little gain)

4) 1 or more of the above.

Note I cannot do number 1 on this computer, football manager takes up over 2 gigabytes these days and my laptop only has 3 gigabytes of ram. However if you have a new 64 bit computer, you will likely have 4 or more gigabytes of ram, which is more than your computer really needs. In which case making a ramdrive to install football manager would probably work very well.

On number 2, I've done some research on the web and some people think its pseudo-science whereas others think there is a performance increase. I intend to holiday a few seasons to see the difference, but I haven't done that yet (allright I forgot). I'll update when I've actually tried this.

Note for any game that is I/O intensive, and their are a few out there, this would probably make a big difference. Also to check how much your computer writes to the hard drive, you can check by going into the resource monitor through the task manager on windows 7

[DivineOne]

1) Create a ramdisk and install football manager onto your ramdisk drive.

If you want to install fm every time when you reboot your pc, sure.

Same with the appdata idea btw.

[x42bn6]

On number 2, I've done some research on the web and some people think its pseudo-science whereas others think there is a performance increase. I intend to holiday a few seasons to see the difference, but I haven't done that yet (allright I forgot). I'll update when I've actually tried this.

It's not really pseudoscience - you just need a lot of RAM - tons of it - to see a difference, due to the fact Windows adjusts itself depending on how much RAM you have. It doesn't really pay to be "efficient" with your RAM in some sense.

This used to be a really good technique back when 486s were in the rage - you could stick some of your games on RAM disks as long as you had over 8 MB of RAM, and it made a huge difference. Although granted, it was much harder to get working back in the 486 days...

[rcoobc]

If you want to install fm every time when you reboot your pc, sure.

Same with the appdata idea btw.

You don't need to do that, there is an option to "save the disk" which you'd need to do before reboot, and I think there is an option to do it automatically. You'd add a few minutes to reload the ramdisk though, but you wouldn't have to reinstall it every time.

[wally13]

x42bn6 you seem to know your stuff, i've 12gb ram would using this ram disk benefit me im curious to try it out

[rcoobc]

With 12 gb of RAM I'd say your perfect for this, there won't be any reason not to do it.

[wally13]

With 12 gb of RAM I'd say your perfect for this, there won't be any reason not to do it.

So how would i go about it lol im usely fairly good with things like this but cant seem to suss out propley what i should do, like do i create a ram disk then put fm onto the ram disk or dose my page file go onto ram disk and how much ram should i allocate to the ram disk etc :confused:

[rcoobc]

Well essentially, those are your two options. If you want to put your pagefile onto your ramdisk, I did it with just over 1.5 gigabytes (but as you have ram to spare I'd give it at least two gigabytes), and the game ran fine (and I think it ran faster). Essentially I followed the instructions from that video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zrecoX2nsOM&feature=player_embedded. If you want to put the game onto it, I think you'd need at least 2.1 gigabytes (as a guess), and the program these days allows up to 2.4. It used to allow up to 4 gigabytes but it seems to allow less to try and make you buy it, but if you found the old version or the full version you could have more.

Either way, install the program, allocate 2 gigabytes, or over 2 gigabytes and if it tells you to restart your computer.

If you want to put your page file onto it, go to your advanced system settings performance -> advanced -> advanced and change your virtual memory to not set. Restart your computer then go back to the virtual memory and choose to create the pagefile in your ramdisk, giving it the full ramdisk to use. You then can play the game as usual, and you don't need to worry about restarting your computer, or returning your page file to its original state (although you can choose automatic if you want to). Note that you can close the ramdisk configuration tool at any time, but you cant turn off the ramdisk until the pagefile is no longer in the ramdisk drive which happens automatically when you turn off your computer.

If you want to install football manager onto the drive, create your ram disk, install football manager to it (you can leave your other football manager installed probably), install the patches and play the game using the new fm.exe (you should keep all your settings probably because that would be in your appdata). When turning off your computer, save the ramdisk using the ramdisk configuration tool, and then reload using it when you turn it back on.

[wally13]

Well essentially, those are your two options. If you want to put your pagefile onto your ramdisk, I did it with just over 1.5 gigabytes (but as you have ram to spare I'd give it at least two gigabytes), and the game ran fine (and I think it ran faster). Essentially I followed the instructions from that video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zrecoX2nsOM&feature=player_embedded. If you want to put the game onto it, I think you'd need at least 2.1 gigabytes (as a guess), and the program these days allows up to 2.4. It used to allow up to 4 gigabytes but it seems to allow less to try and make you buy it, but if you found the old version or the full version you could have more.

Either way, install the program, allocate 2 gigabytes, or over 2 gigabytes and if it tells you to restart your computer.

If you want to put your page file onto it, go to your advanced system settings performance -> advanced -> advanced and change your virtual memory to not set. Restart your computer then go back to the virtual memory and choose to create the pagefile in your ramdisk, giving it the full ramdisk to use. You then can play the game as usual, and you don't need to worry about restarting your computer, or returning your page file to its original state (although you can choose automatic if you want to). Note that you can close the ramdisk configuration tool at any time, but you cant turn off the ramdisk until the pagefile is no longer in the ramdisk drive which happens automatically when you turn off your computer.

If you want to install football manager onto the drive, create your ram disk, install football manager to it (you can leave your other football manager installed probably), install the patches and play the game using the new fm.exe (you should keep all your settings probably because that would be in your appdata). When turning off your computer, save the ramdisk using the ramdisk configuration tool, and then reload using it when you turn it back on.

I'll try it out later and see if there's any difference if im honest my fm fly's as you would expect as i also have the i7-960 cpu and nvidia gtx 460, but im always open to squeezing more from my system to fm

[rcoobc]

i7! It's alright for some

[wally13]

i7! It's alright for some

Splashed out last year lol wont be upgrading for a while

im just trying this now i've allocate 3072 to ramdisk so see how it fairs

[wally13]

Splashed out last year lol wont be upgrading for a while

im just trying this now i've allocate 3072 to ramdisk so see how it fairs

Right pal done that, the ramdisk as 2038 allocated to it and ive set my page file to run from there

so just to clear up why now should i see a difference in how fm runs ?

[Boroboy100]

Testet it. Runs much more fluid. Have 6GB RAM. 3050MB RAMdisk. Would say speed increases from 10-50%.

10-50%??

Which is it?

If it's a 50% increase then lets ALL do it...however for a 10% increase it's not worth the hassle really I wouldn't of thought.

[x42bn6]

x42bn6 you seem to know your stuff, i've 12gb ram would using this ram disk benefit me im curious to try it out

With 12 GB of RAM, I'd wonder if your machine is "slow" enough to experience a difference!

In fairness, I think you will, especially loading and saving games.

10-50%??

Which is it?

If it's a 50% increase then lets ALL do it...however for a 10% increase it's not worth the hassle really I wouldn't of thought.

It depends... I know some people who would kill for a 10% increase that requires little hardware intervention.

Nice to know 6 GB has a noticeable difference, mind.

50% is a little high - maybe that's for loading and saving games, however.

[wally13]

With 12 GB of RAM, I'd wonder if your machine is "slow" enough to experience a difference!

In fairness, I think you will, especially loading and saving games.

Well like i say to be fair my machine is quick so thats what i ment as in is it worth me doing

[-SL]

Is there any dangers of doing this? Like wrecking my laptop? Want to try it but will most likely make a mistake on the way, best be on the safe side...is it easily reversible? Thanks lads.

[Boroboy100]

Would it be recommended for someone like me who is running a AMD X2 5200, Windows XP and 4 gig of RAM?...and like the previous poster....is it easy to reverse if A. it goes wrong or B. a noticable difference is NOT noticed?

[rcoobc]

Yes it is easy to reverse. Set pagecache back to "not set", restart your computer, turn off the ramdisk and maybe restart again. Then set pagecache back to automatic.

Someone else on another forum tried it who had a 2 gigabyte of ram Vista computer and he said it was noticeable quicker, before it BSOD his computer. When he turned it back on everything was back to normal though. I'm fairly certain thats because he didn't leave Vista with enough RAM to run, and he only gave football manager 500mb of ram. It's really up to you, but I'd say be brave and yes you can always turn it back. No guarentees though.

[NLmichiej]

Just tried this, does seem to give a little increase in fluency and a tat in speed. Can't say it's anything special here though.

Running Windows 7, 6GB of RAM of which 2GB is allocated to the RAMDisk.

[bluesjunior]

My PC is running Windows 7 64bit and I recently upgraded from 4GB to 8GB of RAM. My game was previously very fast but I can't say I have noticed much difference since doubling the RAM although now in my 5th season I am starting to notice that instead of a more or less instant response my game now takes 15-20seconds to save, run the background games etc especially during International fixtures. Would it be an advantage to me to try creating such a Ramdisk and if so how big would you recommend I make it?.