Swap space on Nvidia VRAM, in case you bought a 5090 and now can't afford RAM

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https://www.phoronix.com/news/NVIDIA-NBD-VRAM

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This is pretty hilarious but I could definitely see it being useful in some legit situations

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Seems like it would be useful all the times you aren’t playing a resource heavy game

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This is pretty interesting as a half measure towards unified memory. Obviously the PCIe bus is the bottleneck here, but using the 16x slot should be slightly faster than using your NVMe.

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I was wondering about this not that long ago when remembering shit I had to do back in the day when my PC was just an off the shelf Gateway my parents got me: How much faster is having a swap file on an M.2 SSD vs the SATA HDD I would have had back in 2001 or so? And is it still barely an improvement over just installing more RAM, or would it actually be beneficial to some degree these days? 🤔

I really haven’t researched or looked into components since my 20s, so there’s a lot about some of these new components and tech I don’t really know much about. My current rig is just what Reddit had recommended for entry level VR back in 2015/2016.

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At a really high level, SATA III had a 6Gbps data rate (8 bits per Byte, so 750MB/s) so most SATA SSDs were giving you 550MB/s at the most.

Conversely, NVMe is usually a PCIe x4 slot, which tops out at 4GB/s. Most M.2 NVMe drives will give you 3200MB/s, which is easily six times faster.

Edit: for a fun point of reference, old HDDs were about 60MB/s, with high latency on top of that due to seek time.

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Here’s someone testing it to try make a computer without (or with as little as possible) RAM:

https://youtu.be/IHItbgHutVo

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I remember getting puppy linux to work ONLY on RAM. Crazy times we are in when DDR3 is going up in price. I have that in my decade+ old computer.

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I ran puppy off of a 16GB flash drive on my main rig after a catastrophic HDD failure for like a year before I finally got new parts.

Nothing is more permanent than a temporary solution

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How good/bad was it compared to the HDD?

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It was surprisingly decent for running Firefox & a text editor, which covered probably 80% of my usage at the time, so it worked just good enough for me to procrastinate on fixing things.

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Comments in Linux@programming.dev

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Gpu vram is so scarce and precious. Why spend it on something as common as swap space? I skied the github and it mentions latency benefits over swapping to ssd…. but still

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GPU VRAM is so scarce and precious.

That really depends. I have plenty of times when my GPU’s memory is sitting there mostly unused, because I need less than a gig for my desktop, but I have 16 gigs of it for gaming. Those times also correlate with when I really want more general RAM because I’m building some large rust projects with LTO. So this is a great way to put that extra hardware to use. I can always turn off that swap later when I want to play a game.

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