Question Can a PC run mostly on VRAM alone?

[scrunkly]

I plan on getting an RX 6800 very soon, and those 16GB's it has made me wonder if a Pc could run on mostly vram alone..
Like for example, only using 1GB of DDR3 ram and having those 16GB's of VRAM as the only other option.

 

[kanewolf]

I plan on getting an RX 6800 very soon, and those 16GB's it has made me wonder if a Pc could run on mostly vram alone..
Like for example, only using 1GB of DDR3 ram and having those 16GB's of VRAM as the only other option.

Not really. The CPU does not have direct access to the VRAM like it does for system RAM. Even with RDMA, the GPU is controlling transfers rather than the CPU.

 

[BFG-9000]

Well sure, but in a roundabout way. First, install a RAMdisk on the VRAM and then set the pagefile onto it.

This is not exactly fast, but still better than having a pagefile on a SSD. I used to always set a RAMdisk on 32-bit Windows systems to use the otherwise inaccessible RAM above 3.5GB for a pagefile, and the result was slower than normal system RAM (which it actually was...) but better than nothing, especially when the price was free and the RAM unusable for anything else anyway.

Windows 8 put an end to that because I couldn't get a RAMdisk up there to initialize fast enough on boot anymore to be present when the system tried to automatically create the pagefile, so would've had to manually create the pagefile after each boot. You may run into a similar issue with your VRAM RAMdisk with the added complication that your system would be really really slow on 1GB (Windows will automatically create a pagefile on your disk) until you managed to set this up.