News Gamer installs Crysis 3 On GeForce RTX 3090's VRAM - And It Runs

[JOSHSKORN]

Can this tool (VRAM Drive) increase my VRAM by using my M.2. Disk space?

 

[zied206]

GDDR6X memory is PAM4 encoding using it as ram disk may lead to hyper load latency
more With NRZ encodind in gddr6, you had just two states, 0 and 1. PAM4 doubles it to four, 00, 01,10, and 11. Using these four states, you can send four bits of data per cycle
so benift is minor

 

[velocityg4]

What proccy did you have?

PowerPC 601 66Mhz with an AV card. Which I think used an AT&T 66Mhz DSP.

 

[TJ Hooker]

Can this tool (VRAM Drive) increase my VRAM by using my M.2. Disk space?

The purpose of VRAM is to be very fast. Ideally the GPU will have all the assets it needs loaded into VRAM ahead of time. If there isn't enough space and things need to be swapped out on the fly (probably loaded from system RAM) performance usually takes a big hit because system RAM is an order of magnitude slower than dedicated VRAM. If you were to load it from storage instead it'd be another order of magnitude slower than system RAM (even an NVMe SSD). As far as I know there's nothing outright preventing the GPU from loading stuff from storage on the fly (i.e. without any need for a special tool), it's just that you really don't want it to because performance would be terrible because your SSD is ~1/100th the speed of your VRAM.

tl;dr
Your GPU can probably already access your SSD in the way you're imaging without any tool, but doing so would work very badly.

 

[vinay2070]

PowerPC 601 66Mhz with an AV card. Which I think used an AT&T 66Mhz DSP.

Cool, I had a pentium 100 with 8MB ram which was later upgraded to 32MB. Made a huge difference and probably never used all that much of ram until win 95 was installed at a later point. 72mb is sure a lot at that time.

 

[spentshells]

While interesting they are using it as a RAM Disk. Given that it has to travel over the PCIe BUS to the CPU. Given the limits of PCIe and increases in latency. I'd think in reality load times would be slower than a traditional RAM Disk.



That made me remember. I had a whopping 72MB RAM back in the day (8MB was standard). I'd load programs through the RAM disk to really speed up load times. What else was I going to do with all that memory. Even when taxing Photoshop I rarely went over 30MB.

Those were the good ole days. When you could specify how much memory a program could use.

I was working at a computer shop and looked at the prices for 32 MB of ram in 1996..... it wasn't pretty that is for sure.

 

[knowom]

I think the VRAM's potential as storage is limited by the CPU cache. It's also really only practical to accelerate the read speed and I guess copy speed. The write speed is where the PCI-E bus slow down comes into play.