Is there anway to make use of unused VRAM?

[TumbleGeorge]

90% of the time i'm awake i'm not using my brain, either.

Turn it off, save energy. Save planet!

 

[Frick]

Making the fans quieter and adjusting power settings are better ideas than his VRAM one.

Although i do appreciate the ingenuity of the question he asked.

I meant the entire project of using a 1080ti as pagefile is an idea with no upsides.

 

[80251]

It's his mums desktop, and the GPU would be used as pagefile. There are zero benefits to this idea.

Zero benefits eh? There's no NVME slots on this PC, so VRAM would be FASTER than ANY SATA SSD for the pagefile.

Troll harder next time.

 

[Frick]

Zero benefits eh? There's no NVME slots on this PC, so VRAM would be FASTER than ANY SATA SSD for the pagefile.

Troll harder next time.

Not trolling. Would she benefit from the speed? And as I said, 8GB is fine for the vast majority of use cases. Is she a programmer? Does she do a lot of modeling or gaming, or deal with large databases? And again, you can do what you want, but it's a pointless endevour.

 

[unwind-protect]

Zero benefits eh? There's no NVME slots on this PC, so VRAM would be FASTER than ANY SATA SSD for the pagefile.

Troll harder next time.

*plonk*

 

[80251]

Not trolling. Would she benefit from the speed? And as I said, 8GB is fine for the vast majority of use cases. Is she a programmer? Does she do a lot of modeling or gaming, or deal with large databases? And again, you can do what you want, but it's a pointless endevour.

So what OTHER use would you suggest the 11 GiB+ be put to on a 1080ti? Any constructive suggestions? Or just more trolling?

 

[DemonicRyzen666]

Wait is this what you guys were talking about?
Benchmarked: Crysis 3 Running on GPU VRAM and System RAM Disks | Tom's Hardware (tomshardware.com)
That testing was limited by pci-express 3.0 bandwidth.

 

[80251]

It might be interesting to use a VRAM disk with primocache -- maybe as a multi-gigabyte write cache (to save on writes to SSD's without using up system RAM).

 

[Frick]

So what OTHER use would you suggest the 11 GiB+ be put to on a 1080ti? Any constructive suggestions? Or just more trolling?

I've already said it. Sell it or give it to someone who will actually use it. Or build a seperate box and join here. Using it as a pagefile for someone who will not really utilize it ... could be an interesting or project (and report back if you do it, and tell us how her computing experience improved) but beyond that it would serve no purpose.

 

[Calenhad]

@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.

Just because you want something to be true, does not make it true. This is highly experimental to this day, in the ballpark of a student project. But, not only do you want to use this for a daily driver, you want your mother to use it.

I already told you why this is not a good idea from a hardware perspective, but I guess that went over your head.

Either way, try and comprehend that this is really not something that is ready for use. Feel free to experiment with this all you want. Just leave your mother out of it. Break your own daily driver pc instead.

 

[80251]

@Calenhad Please prove this is "highly experimental". Because the github project has been through FOUR revisions and has NO reported bugs with the latest version.

Please continue thread crapping though, it seems to be all you're good at.

 

[eidairaman1]

That would be dependent on the games config files.

On GPU side id rather it run at full clockspeed without dipping in games at all.

 

[80251]

@eidairman1
Strangely enough, tomshardware conducted a test where they loaded Crysis 3 on a VRAM drive, system RAM drive and an NVME M.2 SSD. The loading times for the game and savegames were all within tens of seconds of each other but the average and 99% frametimes favoured the Crysis 3 installation on the VRAM drive!

 

[StefanM]

Lightweight Windows 11 Runs Entirely in GPU's VRAM

Lightweight Windows 11 Runs Entirely in GPU's VRAM

GPU doubles as a RAM drive.

www.tomshardware.com

 

[Morgoth]

even if Vram is faster than normal ram Vram wil stil be limited by the busspeed of the pci-e 16x slot with is slower than the bus speed between the cpu and ram

 

[Mussels]

I meant the entire project of using a 1080ti as pagefile is an idea with no upsides.

There is: It's slower than an SSD, forces the GPU into higher clock speeds at all times and will burn out those VRAM chips faster.
Video memory is hotter and uses more power than system RAM.

I knew tiny11 being ran in VRAM would appear here today, that article had benchmarks that made me think of this thread

the 3050 laptop GPU in the review had scores worse than a budget NVME drive:

the graphics card's VRAM delivered sequential reads and writes up to 1,960 MB/s and 2,497 MB/s

 

[80251]

@Mussels
But a 3050 only has a 128-bit wide (or worse 96-bit) memory data bus and PCIe 4.0x8, the 3090 used by strife212 has a 384-bit memory bus and PCIe 4.0x16. The VRAM memory bandwidth is 224.0 GB/s (worse than a 1080ti) vs. 936.2 GB/s on the 3090. Furthermore, why would it be necessary to increase the GPU clock speed? When I used a 980ti as a dedicated physX accelerator it increased the memory clock but kept the GPU clock below 1000Mhz.

Too bad no one did crystalmark benchmarks on the 3090 VRAM drive.

 

[TumbleGeorge]

96-bit

VRAM memory bandwidth is 224.0 GB/s

For RTX 3050 Max-Q Refresh 6 GB is only 132GB/s. I wonder, how can a relatively modern video card, from only 2-3 years ago, work with such a small data stream? Although it is a budget chip.

 

[Mussels]

@Mussels
But a 3050 only has a 128-bit wide (or worse 96-bit) memory data bus and PCIe 4.0x8, the 3090 used by strife212 has a 384-bit memory bus and PCIe 4.0x16. The VRAM memory bandwidth is 224.0 GB/s (worse than a 1080ti) vs. 936.2 GB/s on the 3090. Furthermore, why would it be necessary to increase the GPU clock speed? When I used a 980ti as a dedicated physX accelerator it increased the memory clock but kept the GPU clock below 1000Mhz.

Too bad no one did crystalmark benchmarks on the 3090 VRAM drive.

The 3090 used as a RAM drive gets about 4GB/s
I can easily do that again, i did in the past and it runs like crap

This is with the CUDA version, which is faster than the generic one

VRAM is *NOT* designed like system RAM or NAND flash - it's got very different performance metrics based on totally different performance requirements so it's not magically fast for every activity

A gen 5 NVME uses 10 watts, vs 70 here - it'd be worse if my card wasnt undervolted.

AS SSD doesnt detect it as an SSD to benchmark, crystaldisk does
Image so you can see what it looks like while it's running

And the performance results vs an actual SSD (WD SN850) thats almost full, which harms its performance a lot

I'm sure there are some rare situations where this could be useful - but you're going to have to have a pretty weird setup with a high VRAM GPU In an otherwise weak PC, which asks the question of why the heck you dont spend a few dollars on an SSD or more RAM in the first place

There's no guarantees these VRAM driver are going to be reliable and avoid corruption, so you definitely risk data loss using them.

Even idle and empty the VRAM drive adds to the power consumption, it has no way to power down when not being used.

 

[Gica]

RAM: 64 bit
VRAM: 16 bit

How do you solve the problem?
Can not. VRAM is only compatible with the GPU.

The good news is that this graphics processor helps in everything you do, not just in 3D applications. It even helps with a simple right click of the mouse, for refreshment.
The bad news for AMD owners is that nVidia uses CUDA, clearly superior to OpenCL. Between two identical systems, except for the video card, the one with a powerful video card in non-3D applications moves better in non-3D applications which are used by hardware acceleration

 

[Lei]

Can not. VRAM is only compatible with the GPU.

Well no, he said linux can shift pagefile to vram. Facts....

 

[R-T-B]

Um, why? And who gets to decide what is a waste of power your majesty?

Judging from how quickly users here were to condemn crypto on the power card, everybody.

Strangely enough the 4090 does have ECC GDDR6x; the use of which can be toggled on/off.

So does the 3090 ti. Little known fact.

90% of the time i'm awake i'm not using my brain, either.

And we all get a good laugh out of it, so net positive!

VRAM is *NOT* designed like system RAM or NAND flash - it's got very different performance metrics based on totally different performance requirements so it's not magically fast for every activity

It's not even that. It has to get to the cpu to be useful. This means using a pcie transfer, obviously inferior to a directly connected ram memory controller.

Well no, he said linux can shift pagefile to vram. Facts....

Right above you mussels posted a windows app too. It's not amazing.

 

[Mussels]

RAM: 64 bit
VRAM: 16 bit

??? I think you've misunderstood how that all works.
Very old image, but a clear example

Then DDR1/2/3/4 systems use 64 bit width per DIMM, usually maxing at 128 in dual channel - even if you ran more sticks (With some platforms like x58 supporting triple channel 192 bit, HEDT doing 256 bit, and so on)

That's just

It's not even that. It has to get to the cpu to be useful. This means using a pcie transfer, obviously inferior to a directly connected ram memory controller.

This is very likely part of it, but i'd have to know how that CUDA code works to be sure.
It could be useful for a low latency temporary storage, but it's also likely to be lost from any sort of driver reset - even from starting a game, sleep states, connecting a new display - no one knows.
Finding a situation where you want high speed data storage but don't care about reliability is an odd one

This is why Directstorage is amazing, but also doesnt need a super fast NVME drive to work - the PCI-E bandwidth and VRAM can't really benefit from the high MB/s, just the low latency and all SSD's are pretty much equal there.

 

[Gica]

Well no, he said linux can shift pagefile to vram. Facts....

As you can see, the processor cannot access VRAM directly. Only the GPU can do it and any attempt to use this memory as RAM, by detours, is just fun and useless. Even the igp has its RAM memory reserved, impossible for the CPU to access.

 

[R-T-B]

As you can see, the processor cannot access VRAM directly. Only the GPU can do it and any attempt to use this memory as RAM, by detours, is just fun and useless. Even the igp has its RAM memory reserved, impossible for the CPU to access.

View attachment 296919

I mean, that's a marketing photo for rebar, and not any kind of evidence, but... you are basically on target. There is no way to directly access vram from the CPU. You can setup a vram drive as demonstrated but the latency is awful because it has to cross the PCIe bus and so is the performance vs a normal ram drive on the CPUs IMC connected directly to ram.