Let's skip ahead of any "Can it run Crysis" introductions for this news piece, and instead state it as it is: Crysis 3 can absolutely run when installed directly on a graphics card's memory subsystem. In this case, an RTX 3090 and its gargantuan 24 GB of GDDR6X memory where the playground for such an experiment. Using the "VRAM Drive" application, distributed in an open-source manner via the GitHub platform, one can allocate part of their GPU's VRAM and use it as if it was just another system drive. After doing so, user Strife212 (as per her Twitter handle) then went on to install Crysis 3 on 15 GB of the allocated VRAM. The rest of the card's 9 GB were then available to actually load in graphical assets for the game, and VRAM consumption (of both the installed game and its running assets) barely crossed the 20 GB total VRAM utilization.

As you might expect, graphics memory is one of the fastest memory subsystems on your PC, being even faster (in pure performance terms) than system RAM. Loading up of game levels and asset streaming from VRAM "disk-sequestered" pools to free VRAM pools was obviously much faster than usual, even more than the speeds achieved by today's NVMe drives. Crysis 3 in this configuration was shown to run by as many as 75 FPS in 4K resolution, with the High preset settings. A proof of concept more than anything - but users with a relatively powerful (or memory-capable) graphics card can perhaps look at this exotic solution as a compromise of sorts, should they not have any fast storage options, and provided the game install size is relatively small.