NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 3090 is, without doubt, the most powerful consumer graphics cards on the current market, and has more graphics memory than any game would be able to utilise. For one gamer, this presented an opportunity to do something quite out of the box: install Crysis 3 on to the card.
The game, who goes by the name Strife (@@Strife212) on Twitter, posted her success in installing the third instalment in the Crysis series on the RTX 3090’s VRAM, and having it run both smoothly and efficiently. And at 4K resolution, to boot.
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
How Strife did this was through a program called VRAM Drive. The program basically allowed her to create a 15GB virtual disk on the RTX 3090’s VRAM, for her to install the game on. The remaining 9GB of VRAM was then used as graphics memory to run the game.
As to how it performed, Strife was clearly happy with her success; Not only did Crysis 3 run smoothly at 4K resolution, but its also loads fast and was hitting an average of 75fps with the game’s highest graphics setting. Moreover, VRAM utilisation wasn’t even close to reaching the 20GB mark.
On the surface, the concept of installing games on VRAM is sound; VRAM is by far the fastest memory solution in any system, and using it as an SSD clearly cuts load times down tremendously. That said, NVMe SSDs already offer equally, if negligible load times, and software features such as NVIDIA’s RTX I/O are set to cut load times down even further for games.
(Source: Strife via Twitter, Tom’s Hardware // Image: EA)
