Crysis 3 Installed On and Run Directly from RTX 3090 24 GB GDDR6X VRAM

[Raevenlord]

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.



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[EarthDog]

lol, cute.

 

[birdie]

The GPU Ram Drive application is ages old and I find it puzzling why people all of a sudden have remembered about it.

 

[kony]

Wow, 3090 can run Crisis 3 in high resolution, amazing!!!

 

[bubbleawsome]

Just a small note that Strife is a woman, so not really his vram there.

 

[neatfeatguy]

Just a small note that Strife is a woman, so not really his vram there.

Everyone knows women don't play video games.

On a more serious note here - actually, I don't have one. I'll just move along now.

 

[LiveOrDie]

who cares ram disk is old news.

 

[rutra80]

A lot of that VRAM-stored data needs to go to CPU. CPU has worse access to VRAM than to RAM. I'd treat that article with a grain of salt...

 

[laszlo]

one downside...if you forget and shut down the pc need to install it again and again....

 

[Vya Domus]

A lot of that VRAM-stored data needs to go to CPU. CPU has worse access to VRAM than to RAM. I'd treat that article with a grain of salt...

Indeed, it's probably no better than a really fast NVME drive.

 

[bug]

See? This is why 3090 is kinda cool, despite its sky-high price: it can do things not possible before.

 

[rutra80]

Indeed, it's probably no better than a really fast NVME drive.

I doubt even that. It might be goodish with single threaded sequential access when there's not much going on PCIe bus, but otherwise I expect it to be much worse than ramdisk placed on motherboard RAM...

 

[Raevenlord]

Just a small note that Strife is a woman, so not really his vram there.

Indeed. Thank you, corrected.

 

[bug]

A lot of that VRAM-stored data needs to go to CPU. CPU has worse access to VRAM than to RAM. I'd treat that article with a grain of salt...

This is about replacing the SSD<->CPU data path, not the RAM<->CPU data path

 

[Caring1]

Just a small note that Strife is a woman, so not really his vram there.

Rhyming slang?
Trouble & strife = Wife.

 

[rutra80]

This is about replacing the SSD<->CPU data path, not the RAM<->CPU data path

Yeah, still I would replace that SSD with motherboard-based ramdisk. But surely there would be no wow factor in comparison to "RTX on" ramdisk

 

[fynxer]

I want to run Warzone from VRAM, any GFX card with 512GB memory out there

 

[bug]

Yeah, still I would replace that SSD with motherboard-based ramdisk. But surely there would be no wow factor in comparison to "RTX on" ramdisk

Obviously there are better ways of playing a game other than from VRAM. But it's a neat proof of concept imho. Bonus points for including Crysis in the story

 

[bubbleawsome]

Rhyming slang?
Trouble & strife = Wife.

I don't think I get it?

 

[Vayra86]

See? This is why 3090 is kinda cool, despite its sky-high price: it can do things not possible before.

Yay, it can run software in a completely useless way at reduced performance?
Definitely worth 1500

including Crysis in the story

That's really all there is to it, I'm still waiting for the eternal 'I installed Doom on my 3090'

 

[ZoneDymo]

The GPU Ram Drive application is ages old and I find it puzzling why people all of a sudden have remembered about it.

ermm who says anyone ever forgot?
that is like saying its odd we all of a sudden do Ray Tracing because that is ages old as well, we just never had the hardware to do it in real time.
Its just that we currently have a capable card with a relatively large amount of Vram, the only thing I find odd is that they did not use the (lacking) Crysis Remaster....wait wait no...probably not enough Vram for it

 

[ZeppMan217]

The GPU Ram Drive application is ages old and I find it puzzling why people all of a sudden have remembered about it.

24 gigs on a prosumer grade card, and maybe some PR for the upcoming Crysis 1 remaster.

 

[stimpy88]

All this does is highlight nVidias greed when it comes to the pathetic 10GB on the "flagship" 3080.

 

[okbuddy]

how come she got this brain ha

 

[Aquinus]

Why is this even an article? Reading game data from VRAM, which has to be read to system memory before going back to the GPU, is only going to hurt performance. It's fancy that you can do this, but it's really a sub-par solution compared to just using a normal RAM disk. Accessing system memory is going to be far faster than doing twice the number of transfers over PCIe to and from the same device. This isn't a win for latency and it's not a win for bandwidth compared to the alternative.

tl;dr edit: Buy more ram and make a ram disk, it'll be cheaper and faster.