When you think of graphics cards, you’re thinking of one thing, performance. The more expensive and higher up you go, the more performance you can expect out of your games. There’s more to it than that for sure, but it’s arguably the biggest part. The RTX 3090 is the most recent innovation outside of AMD’s upcoming graphics cards, and it’s coming out of the game with an overabundant amount of video memory (VRAM). So much in fact, that it gave Twitter user Strife212 an unusual but intriguing idea. What if you could install an intensive game like Crysis 3 onto the card itself?
How They Did It
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
— Lunar Princess Strife (@Strife212) October 4, 2020
If that concept sounds bizarre to you, that’s because it is. That kind of thing hasn’t been heard of, primarily due to most video cards being around 6GB of VRAM. The RTX 3090 though is a different story, as it sports an astounding 24GB of VRAM. With that, Strife212 got to work using a program called VRAM Drive to accomplish the task. This program converts part of your VRAM into a virtual disk, which essentially means another hard drive. Given Crysis 3’s relatively small size, they were able to use 15GB to create this drive, leaving 9GB to handle running programs. That’s still a lot by today’s standards, as the upcoming Cyberpunk 2077 only needs 6GB of VRAM to run at recommended specifications.
And with that, they launched Crysis 3 just fine. Strife212 didn’t give off exact details on performance stats, but they were running the game at 4K resolution. As well, you can see the game was reaching 75FPS in that third Twitter screenshot. Given that the first level is intensive due to the rain effects, that’s pretty solid for 4K. Guess it just goes to show you that with the RTX 3090, you’re getting the performance you paid for.
It’ll be exciting to see what crafty gamers manage to do next with the RTX 3090, especially on intensive games like Crysis 3? For now, I want to hear your thoughts on this story? Is the idea of installing games onto a graphics card as bizarre as it is to me? What do you think people will try to do next with the card? Let me know in the comments below!
