few days ago i just found a street by chance that said i installed crysis 3 on my graphics
card which is very intriguing so i looked into it a bit more and found that there is
an app called gpu ram drive that lets you create a virtual drive using vram on your graphics card
so in this video i will test this using my rtx 2060 and see how it's going to perform ready
let's check it out start with the setup the gpu ram drive requires ImDisk virtual driver
so i'm going to download and install it first
then download the gpu ram drive itself from github
setting up the virtual drive is very easy just type in the amount of the memory you want to
allocate from the graphics card then change the drive letter if needed and click mount
sadly i don't have high end graphics card with huge memory like rtx 3090 my rtx 2060 only have
6 gigs of ram so i'm going to create a drive with just 3 gigs size the interesting part here is once
we mount to drive the gpu will always be in active state as you can see the gpu clocks goes up so we
need to keep in mind that the power consumption will also increase when using the gpu ram drive
the installation speed is well fast but didn't quite that impressive comparing to regular ssd
and after install the game it's time for the test
i also installed the same demo on nvme ssd as a comparison and here is the result
as you can see the difference of the loading time is minimal but pretty
understandable because there is also cpu task involved and not just the disk performance
i ran the game on both 1080p resolution and noticed just a very small drop in performance
despite most of the memory we allocated to the virtual drive
now let's look at the actual data transfer rate for crystal this mark my samsung 860
SATA SSD drive can read around 500 megabytes per second while the 970 evo m.2 NVMe is around 3500
megabytes per second and surprisingly the VRAM drive is actually slower than NVMe SSD in reading
speed with the transfer rate at around 2000 megabytes per second well i believe the reason why
vram drive is much slower mainly because the cpu have to access the memory through graphics card
instead of directly interacting with the memory but still the difference is quite huge now let's
look at the write speed SATA SSD of course scored last place with around 500 megabytes per second
but now vram drive beats the nvme ssd with 2500 megabytes per second versus 1500
so even the cpu cannot access the vram directly the extremely fast write speed of the GDDR Chip
can still make the drive perform better in writing speed using vram drive is cool
idea but actually the idea of using volatile memory as a virtual storage isn't that new
people use ram to create virtual storage for a while now using tools like ram disk
so i'm going to create a ram drive and compare it with our gpu ram drive
and result is ram drive totally annihilated vram drive with the
read speed at around 8 gigs per second and write speed at 15 gigs per second
so even though the gpu ram has massive bandwidth compared to ram but it's designed for transferring
huge amount of data at the same time like texture and shading data and also the cpu have to access
the memory through the graphics card instead of doing it directly which create considerable
overhead these are reasons why the VRAM drive is much slower than ram drive now we all know that
the vram drive isn't quite that fast as we think and even slower than the nvme ssd in reading speed
so the question is why first the ssd memory ship have a limited number of write cycle so if you are
working on a task that is i/o intensive like data processing then your ssd lifespan could be very
short like couple years so using virtual drive as a temporary storage solution is a good idea
but since using ram is faster and a better solution this application only serve as a
proof concept and actually the developer of the gpu ram drive already stated on a project page
so that's all for this video you can find all the links to download these tools and
apps in the description box below let me know what you think and don't forget to subscribe
our channel if you like this video thanks for watching and stay tuned for the next upload bye