The graphics card is designed to simply render games. Part of the calculations and textures are stored in the VRAM of the graphics card. The amount of memory present on the graphics card directly influences the performance of this component.
“DIY” Fan Things
The operating system is designed to be installed on a hard disk, SSD or HDD. It is not installed in the RAM memory, because it would be erased when you turn off the computer and you will have to reinstall it. It would be more interesting to install it in RAM, because of the speeds, but the volatility of this memory makes it impractical.
But, youtuber NTDev wanted to try something different: use graphics card VRAM. More specifically, he did so in a laptop with an NVIDIA RTX 3050. This graphics card only has 4 GB of GDDR6 memorytherefore it does not allow you to run the full version of the operating system.
Specifically, you used Lowercase11nail reduced version of Windows 11. This version of the operating system requires only 2 GB of RAM and 8 GB of hard disk space. Thanks to this reduced version, you were able to use the VRAM of the graphics card as if it were system memory.
What you did was assign the 6 GB of VRAM as if it was his computer RAM memory. Specifically, you 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 was able to do this without a problem.
As noted, it achieved performance close to what an M.2 PCIe 3.0 SSD would offer. Specifically, it achieved read speeds of up to 1960MB/s and write speeds of up to 2497MB/s.
What’s the point?
In fact, it is not useful for much, except to experiment and see the possibilities. It’s still great for those with older computers, who may see a performance boost.
It should be borne in mind that the RAM has a direct communication bus with the processor. But, communicating with the VRAM comes down to going through a slower bus than that intended for the RAM and going through the GPU of the graphics card. This increases latency and therefore reduces speeds.
But, if we have DDR3 RAM in our system and we have NVIDIA GTX 1060 6GB or AMD RX 580 8GB, we will get extra performance. Of course, doing this process is a bit complicated and not 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 other things). 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 went out, everything had to be reinstalled.
