Nvidia RTX 3090 is such a monster it can have Crysis 3 installed in VRAM – and run it smoothly at 4K

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By Darren Allan
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GPU identity Crysis…

(Image credit: Nvidia)

We’ve seen the original Crysis running entirely on a CPU (with no graphics card needed at all), and here’s another interesting feat along similar (kind of) lines: Crysis 3 running directly from a GPU, having been installed in the card’s memory.

Yes, this is another strange one – and like the aforementioned CPU shenanigans, more of an interesting trick than anything actually useful – but an enterprising software engineer installed Crysis on a GeForce RTX 3090.

How does that work? As Strife212 explained in a tweet, she used an application called VRAM Drive to implement a 15GB virtual drive (NTFS partition) within the RTX 3090’s VRAM.

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Of course, that graphics card has a ton of video memory – 24GB of the stuff – meaning the remaining 9GB of VRAM was enough for the game to use as graphics memory.

Plenty enough, in fact, because Crysis ran pretty well directly from the graphics card, even at 4K and high settings, with one screenshot showing 75 frames per second being achieved. Pretty smooth indeed, and total VRAM usage only reached 20.5GB, meaning a few Gigabytes were still spare.

Speedy loading

Theoretically, using VRAM as an installation medium should produce some seriously fast load times, although Strife212 noted that there is a bottleneck somewhere (later in that Twitter thread), as speeds – while obviously good – didn’t quite achieve what NVMe SSDs can manage today. Certainly not the top drives anyway, with the latest PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSDs which are turning up now offering some truly astounding performance levels.

Perhaps we can expect more innovative and strange ways to run the Crysis games in the future, because, well: why not?

Via Tom’s Hardware

Darren Allan

Darren is a freelancer writing news and features for TechRadar (and occasionally T3) across a broad range of computing topics including CPUs, GPUs, various other hardware, VPNs, antivirus and more. He has written about tech for the best part of three decades, and writes books in his spare time (his debut novel - 'I Know What You Did Last Supper' - was published by Hachette UK in 2013).