Out of Pod Experience

Having played eve with a ramdisk i'm not quite sure why you are receiving those results you mention. Perhaps your hard disk is very fragmented and unfortunately acting as something of a bottleneck that's grievously impairing your graphics performance when it comes to getting textures to the card from the hard drive. But even if it was, a jump of 5-30 fps vs. 100+ seems a little odd, on the same graphics card.

My last guess would be tied to the 1GB of ram on the graphics card. Perhaps eve currently with all graphics settings at high needs more than 1gb of texture ram. As your card lacks this, you end up with -alot- of swapping between normal ram, gddr gfx card ram & your hard drive.

A ramdisk should benefit load times, when you have the entire shared cache folder (just over 20 gig currently) copied / assigned to a ramdisk. The difference it should be making may marginally improve FPS, - but only due to textures being sent from ramdisk to graphics card that much faster than if the textures were coming from a platter-based hard disk. The speed of a spinning hard drive, 7200 rpm vs. pure ramdisk are universes of performance apart. Megabytes per second read/write vs. terabytes a second for read/write time. With a ram disk, presume easily 4k random r/w @ 5-6tb/s and sequential r/w somewhere around 10-11 tb/s. Terabytes/second /o\ :)

The benefits most obviously noticeable should be client load time when you first log in. The loading of a busy grid, after entering another solar system or warping to a fight / location for PVE/PVP. A ram disk ought to be making these load times practically immediate (faster than even using a modern SSD), with the only waiting occurring for server information & confirms regarding what should be rendered by the graphics card.

The other thing as far as eve is concerned is that the ~300 or so mb of data you've copied to the ram disk are primarily related to the .exe and basic core support files (afaik). Placing them into a ram disk, shouldn't give you a large increase in performance, particularly graphics performance.

Now if you have 32 gig of ram and copied the "shared cache" for example -

C:\Users\YOURUSERNAME\Documents\EVE\ProgramData\CCP\EVE\SharedCache\

that's listed in the eve launcher, to a directory in your ram disk, formatted to 24 gig for example, leaving windows & eve 8 gig of free ram -

R:\CCP\SharedCache\

You'd have near perfect load times for -everything- in eve.

FPS increase however? ehm...

Only if the graphics memory on your card is not enough for eve's modest needs. At that point, your card would likely start doing a lot of swapping of textures between graphics card ram, system ram and hard drive. The swapping due to insufficient graphics memory *would* cause notable performance issues.