Thieving my GPU RAM

[Foxa]

Hello,

 

I have a query I hope someone knows the answer too, My graphics card has lots of lovely ram on it that I don't use much of while I am using... say a spreadsheet.

I want to steal the video ram and have it as extra system ram  

Not physically, I just mean some kind of funky do-dad cuda code that says "Hi windows, hears some more ram for you to use" 

Can it be done?

 

 

[bleedblue]

no

[Slottr]

GDDR and DDR are totally different things, no.

[Lord Nicoll]

1 minute ago, Foxa said:

Hello,

 

I have a query I hope someone knows the answer too, My graphics card has lots of lovely ram on it that I don't use much of while I am using... say a spreadsheet.

I want to steal the video ram and have it as extra system ram  

Not physically, I just mean some kind of funky do-dad cuda code that says "Hi windows, hears some more ram for you to use" 

Can it be done?

 

 

Not really, that memory is for the GPU rendering engine, it's not something that can easily be shared to the CPU unlike system RAM which can be used as additional frame buffers if the VRAM runs out. The drivers don't allow access to the memory like that. There are programmes that use GPU acceleration and ergo would use small amounts of video RAM, but it's just that, Video RAM.  If you're low on system RAM either close some background applications or buy more/upgrade. 

[Foxa]

Ok, well as a starting point it would seem fairly easy to use some of the gigabytes of unused video ram as at least a high speed swap file location.

[DuckDodgers]

The really short explanation of why this is not practical is that the PCIe link between the GPU and the CPU is not cache-coherent.

What you ask for is the GPU to act as a second "CPU" so both memory locations (system RAM and graphics RAM) can be pooled together as a single addressable space -- that's essentially how multiprocessor (NUMA) systems work. Even if there was a way to put the page file in the graphics memory (and program the GPU to do the paging), the CPU would have no information what is being done by the GPU, until the result is being copied back to the system memory for verification and thus nullifying the benefit of the extra memory space and performance.

[Foxa]

Well, I just made my gpu ram into a ramdisk using a few tools from github and ran an entire VM from it and its lightning quick. I think you guys talked yourself out of a good thing here, especially temp storage and the shortening lifetime of ever more dense SSD.

[Foxa]

if you wish tro have a play , get 

https://sourceforge.net/projects/imdisk-toolkit/

(needed)

and https://github.com/prsyahmi/GpuRamDrive/releases

 

nothing ground breaking but this is a 10+ year old laptop and thats better than my SATA SSD thats at about 575 read and 500 write