Is there anway to make use of unused VRAM?

[80251]

If you're at the desktop chances are you don't need 8GiB, 12GiB, 16GiB or 24GiB of VRAM. Is there anyway to put it to use for other purposes? Can firefox/chrome/edge use VRAM instead of system RAM for their purposes?

 

[sLowEnd]

If you're at the desktop chances are you don't need 8GiB, 12GiB, 16GiB or 24GiB of VRAM. Is there anyway to put it to use for other purposes? Can firefox/chrome/edge use VRAM instead of system RAM for their purposes?

no

 

[freeagent]

You could give it to me..

 

[oxrufiioxo]

You could give it to me..

If I could give you 8GB from my 4090 I would it will be relegated to 1440p duties whenever 50 series comes out most likely anyways....

 

[freeagent]

If I could give you 8GB from my 4090 I would it will be relegated to 1440p duties whenever 50 series comes out most likely anyways....

I need a new GPU for my boy, well for me I guess.. and he could have this one.. but I am feeling mighty stingy these days

I will cave sooner or later.. or maybe just wait for 50 series.. looks pretty serious..

 

[johnspack]

Bill Gates told me my 6Gbs is all I ever ought to need! I'm sticking with it.....

 

[Fizban]

I'll meanwhile stick to 16, minimum. I've had 16 GB VRAM for the past 2-3 years now. 8's just not enough, and I'm not convinced 12 is either.

 

[Toothless]

Gotta justify that 4090 somehow I guess.

 

[Solaris17]

run stable diffusion I run out of vram frequently /cry

 

[oxrufiioxo]

run stable diffusion I run out of vram frequently /cry

Same, it's fun to mess around with.

 

[AusWolf]

Why would you want to use VRAM when it's not needed?

This question sounds to me a bit like "my race car has 800 HP, it's there any way to use all of it on public roads?"

The answer isn't just "no", but also "why".

 

[Lei]

Why would you want to use VRAM when it's not needed?

This question sounds to me a bit like "my race car has 800 HP, it's there any way to use all of it on public roads?"

The answer isn't just "no", but also "why".

System ram can be used as vram, but not vice versa.
Cpu can do graphics, but graphic processor can't handle general stuff.

You can swim in a glass of water if it's big enough, but you can't drink the ocean. @80251

 

[80251]

Why would you want to use VRAM when it's not needed?

This question sounds to me a bit like "my race car has 800 HP, it's there any way to use all of it on public roads?"

The answer isn't just "no", but also "why".

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/gamer-installs-crysis-3-on-geforce-rtx-3090s-vram-and-it-runs

According to the article:

'Using a program called "VRAM Drive" Strife212 was able to make a 15GB virtual disk on the RTX 3090's VRAM and physically install Crysis 3 onto it, leaving 9GB of VRAM remaining for Crysis 3 to use as graphics memory, which is plenty for any video game by today's standards. '

'This is really cool to see, VRAM is the fastest memory-solution in your system, exceeding the performance of system RAM, so using it as an SSD should yield some amazing loading times for video games. And theoretically, you can do this with any graphics card, as long as the game fits inside your GPU's frame buffer.'

'She reports Crysis 3 loads fast, and performance is really good (screenshot shows 75FPS). She ran Crysis 3 at 4k very high settings with VRAM utilization barely hitting the 20GB mark. '

Here's another article discussing performance testing of the above:
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/crysis-3-vram-disk-benchmarks

I was really thinking that I could maybe use one of my spare 1080ti's for my mother's computer (which only has 8 GiB of system RAM) and maybe throw the pagefile and TEMP directory onto the 1080ti.

 

[Calenhad]

Just because it could be done with a 7 year (then) old game back in 2020, does not make it a good solution. If this was a workable solution, I guarantee that you would see paid software that does this today.

This is really cool to see, VRAM is the fastest memory-solution in your system, exceeding the performance of system RAM, so using it as an SSD should yield some amazing loading times for video games. And theoretically, you can do this with any graphics card, as long as the game fits inside your GPU's frame buffer.

For any modern game you are most likely going to run into some new, exciting bottlenecks. You are suddenly sending large amounts of non-graphics data both ways over PCIe. You could, for once, end up saturating the PCIe x16 bus. The GPU have to do double work reading/writing generic data to VRAM, which it is not optimised to do. Memory controllers suddenly have to do other tasks than feeding the GPU data at lightning speed. Just because VRAM have higher clocks than system RAM, does not mean the real world performance is better. There are tons of other factors in that equation. A GPU and by extension VRAM was never designed to be used as general storage. VRAM is specifically made for graphics performance, hence the G in GDDRx. Which obviously make it faster than DDRx memory for graphics. But there is a reason your system RAM is not GDDRx, and cheap GPUs with DDRx ram as VRAM have crap memory performance.

Back to your outside of gaming example: What is your mother doing with her computer? 8GB of RAM is most likely more than enough for her usage, if I can make an assumption based on 99% of the mothers I know. Which means that moving the pagefile and temp folder to VRAM storage will have minimal impact on the performance of her computer. They are really not that heavily used in most modern computers anyway. Does her computer have spinning metal storage? Get her a 250GB SSD and call it quits. Heck, sell that 1080ti and get her more RAM and a SSD.

You are honestly looking for a complex, experimental solution to a non-existing problem.

You can swim in a glass of water if it's big enough, but you can't drink the ocean.

Says it all really.

 

[Regeneration]

To create a RAM drive on it:

GitHub - prsyahmi/GpuRamDrive: RamDrive that is backed by GPU Memory

RamDrive that is backed by GPU Memory. Contribute to prsyahmi/GpuRamDrive development by creating an account on GitHub.

github.com

 

[80251]

@Calenhad
Just because you call it an experiment doesn't mean it hasn't been tried and tested by others. Your objections only apply to gaming, but using excess VRAM as storage may be as fast or faster than any NVME SSD so why not use it for something? It might not be large enough for a pagefile but why not for OS temp directories or a browser cache? It looks to me like Windows 10 is using less than 1 GiB of VRAM, which means the rest is going to waste. 10 GiB of wasted VRAM on a 1080ti that could easily be used as a pagefile for a system with only 8 GiB of system RAM.

 

[A Computer Guy]

If you're at the desktop chances are you don't need 8GiB, 12GiB, 16GiB or 24GiB of VRAM. Is there anyway to put it to use for other purposes? Can firefox/chrome/edge use VRAM instead of system RAM for their purposes?

Back in the primitive days of CGA/VGA someone I know figured out how to steal/repurpose video card memory for applications.

 

[Count von Schwalbe]

GDDR latencies are high at best, being the tradeoff for high bandwidth. This is why the 4700S and 4800S are not great as a desktop. Add the PCIe bus and it gets worse.

Pretty unsuitable as an extension to system RAM.

Better than NAND though, so I would imagine that a PF in VRAM could have a performance benefit.

The only way I see that working is a program to dynamically allocate page file to either VRAM or disk, depending on VRAM usage, and present it as a virtual drive to Windows.

 

[Wirko]

browser cache?

This seems like a sensible use of VRAM. Chrome tabs use huge amounts of system RAM - why is that, what exactly is stored there? Uncompressed JPGs? Pre-rendered pages or parts of pages? All of those could as well sit in VRAM.

 

[80251]

Theoretically, if you have obsolete videocards with a lot of VRAM but not enough performance for gaming, maybe you could re-purpose them as some sort of high speed temporary storage pool. I had initially looked into this idea with Linux and an old HP box I had with CentOS 5 on it that only had 2 GiB of RAM and one HDD. Linux has the capability of moving the swapfile to VRAM, which would've worked great for this old box.

 

[Lei]

Linux has the capability of moving the swapfile to VRAM, which would've worked great for this old box.

that's the last nail in my coffin. you proved me wrong.

I wanted to say I'm probably wrong, many times before @Calenhad posted. But I thought since I have no solution, pointing to no answer is unnecessary.

Would love to see how @Regeneration idea works.

System ram can be used as vram, but not vice versa.
Cpu can do graphics, but graphic processor can't handle general stuff.

You can swim in a glass of water if it's big enough, but you can't drink the ocean. @80251

I should never say that again.

 

[wolf]

As someone else posted, I believe there was an instance of using VRAM as a disk to run Crysis, or something, but it seems academic at best, hardly useful in a real world scenario. Seems like a solution looking for a problem.

 

[Frick]

I was really thinking that I could maybe use one of my spare 1080ti's for my mother's computer (which only has 8 GiB of system RAM) and maybe throw the pagefile and TEMP directory onto the 1080ti.

Waste of power. And for others computers I really recommend keeping it at simple as possible.

 

[Turmeric]

use your pc to create something, blender or unreal editor can never have enough.

 

[Vayra86]

or maybe just wait for 50 series.. looks pretty serious..

They always do, until they get released and you're quickly going to wonder why you waited in the first place.

I think the new MO is that the new series will make you look long and hard at the last gen and wait for the inevitable price cut.