NVIDIA RTX 3090 runs Crysis 3 installed on its VRAM
Someone just installed and ran Crysis 3 on NVIDIA's most powerful GeForce RTX 3090 graphics card. Computer experts and gamers would probably be shaking their heads, thinking "that's not how computers work", but the joke would be on them. That's because someone literally installed the graphics-intensive 2013 game on the graphics card whopping 24GB of Video RAM and even played it in 4K and full settings without missing a beat or possibly even a framerate.
You don't install games on RAM or even on VRAM precisely because it is RAM, a.k.a. the volatile Random Access Memory. They're arguably fast, faster than the fastest SSD, but the moment your computer loses power, intentionally or accidentally, poof goes your installed program. Still, with an inordinate amount of VRAM, it was tempting to see just how far the RTX 3090 could go.
Twitter user @Strife212 thought it would be cool to try installing Crysis 3, the franchise that was once the benchmark for graphics capability, on the graphics card directly. He used the GPU Ram Drive tool to create a 15GB partition out of the 24GB VRAM that Windows could then see and treat like a regular drive.
@Strife212 testifies that he was able to run Crysis 3 smoothly in 4K and at high settings. The game loads fast and, fortunately, the total VRAM use, which includes the partitioned RAM drive, is only 20GB, leaving plenty of wiggle room for actual graphics data.
I installed Crysis 3 on my graphics card!
I used some VRAMdrive software called GPU Ram Drive, made a 15GB NTFS partition on the GPU, then installed Crysis 3 on it
At 4K very high settings get good fps and the game loads very fast – GPU-Z reports total VRAM use 20434MB pic.twitter.com/lLcQsD5JYM
— Internet Angel Strife (@Strife212) October 4, 2020
The gamer himself clarified that there are no benefits to loading times compared to a fast NVMe SSD. Comments suggest that, at this point, the bottle is really the DRAM and the CPU which still have to do their tasks as normal regardless of where the game was actually installed. It's more a testament to the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090's hardware that it's even possible but it will unlikely revolutionize PC gaming this way.