Make A Virtual Drive Using Your Video Card’s RAM

RAM drives aren’t as popular as they used to be, with the speedy performance of solid-state drives good enough for most. But they still have their uses and with the average PC sporting 8GB of system RAM, sparing a couple of gigabytes is not a problem. The thing is, video cards are starting to pack on memory as well. So, is it possible to use GPU RAM as a virtual drive? Certainly.

A project called GpuRamDrive by Syahmi Azhar is available on GitHub and while there is some assembly required, it will let you use some of your video card’s memory as a virtual drive. If you want to give it a go, I’ll say it now — you will need to compile the application yourself using Visual Studio.

After that, you’ll need to grab a few other programs — ImDisk and DevIo. Full instructions can be found via the project’s GitHub repo.

As to how it peforms, you can see the benchmarks for yourself in the lead image. Azhar also provides some additional details:

Using GPU RAM isn’t as fast as host main memory, however it is still faster than a regular HDD. The result [above] is taken on my system with GTX 850M and i7-4710MQ. As IO operation is happening between the CPU and GPU, the GPU can become active from idle state and might causes system to draw more power.

While using GPU memory in this way isn’t very practical, it might prove a decent option once video cards regularly come with 8GB or more.

GpuRamDrive [GitHub, via Reddit]


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