The graphics card is designed to render games, simply put. Part of the calculations and textures are stored in the VRAM of the graphics card. The amount of memory on the graphics card directly influences the performance of this component.
Things of fans of “tinkering”
The operating system is designed to be installed on a hard drive, either SSD or HDD. It is not installed in RAM memory, since it would be erased when you turn off the computer and you would have to re-install it. It would be more interesting to install it in RAM, because of the speeds, but the volatility of this memory makes it unfeasible.
But, the youtuber NTDev wanted to try something different: use the VRAM of the graphics card. Specifically, he has done it in a laptop with an NVIDIA RTX 3050. This graphics card has only 4GB of GDDR6 memoryso it does not allow you to run the full version of the operating system.
Specifically, you have used tiny11a stripped down version of windows 11. This version of the operating system only requires 2 GB of RAM and 8 GB of hard drive space. Thanks to this reduced version, you have been able to use the VRAM of the graphics card as if it were the system memory.
What you have done is assign the 6GB of VRAM as if it were her own computer RAM memory. Specifically, you have used 3550 MB to run Tiny11this compressed version of Windows 11. Requiring much less RAM than the full version (Windows 11 requires 8 GB of RAM) it has been able to do it without problems.
As indicated, it has obtained performance close to what an M.2 PCIe 3.0 SSD would offer. Specifically, it has achieved reading speeds of up to 1960 MB/s and writing speeds of up to 2497 MB/s.
What is this for?
Actually, it is not useful for much, other than to experiment and see possibilities. This is still interesting for those who have old computers, who can see a performance increase.
We must bear in mind that RAM has a direct communication bus with the processor. But, communicating with the VRAM means going through a slower bus than the one designed for RAM and going through the GPU of the graphics card. This increases latency and consequently reduces speeds.
But, if we have DDR3 RAM in our system and we have an NVIDIA GTX 1060 6 GB or an AMD RX 580 8 GB, we will obtain an extra performance. Although of course, doing this process is a bit complicated and not suitable for everyone.
The truth is that these practices are not new. Before the advent of SSDs, special RAM-based systems were used for overclocking (among others). There was a kind of hard drive where you installed RAM modules and got great performance. But, they had the problem that when the power was lost, you had to install everything again.
