This shouldn’t come as a shock to anyone who’s familiar with software such as RAMDisk, but you can, in fact, install games onto your graphics card. Strife212 demonstrated this curious storage arrangement over the weekend by installing Crysis 3 directly onto NVIDIA’s new BFGPU, the GeForce RTX 3090.
With the help of prsyahmi’s GpuRamDrive (which you can grab at GitHub), she was able create a virtual disk using a portion of the GeForce RTX 3090’s relatively generous 24 GB of VRAM. Then it was just a matter of installing Crytek’s game.
“I used some VRAMdrive software called GPU Ram Drive, made a 15GB NTFS partition on the GPU, then installed Crysis 3 on it,” Strife explained. “At 4K very high settings get good fps and the game loads very fast – GPU-Z reports total VRAM use 20434MB.”
Critics have pointed out that she would have been better off installing the game on a regular RAM drive instead of VRAM due to increased latency (i.e., the data would be circling back to standard memory, anyway), but this is pretty cool for those of you who want to convince your friends that GPUs can not only run games, but store them, too.
That said, Ryan Reynolds’s “But why?” GIF seems obligatory here. With RAM being as volatile as it is, you’d have to install the game every time the PC was restarted or lost power.
I installed Crysis 3 on my graphics card!
— Strife, la fillette révolutionnaire (@Strife212) October 4, 2020
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