WTF?! Now you’ll be able to bypass your laborious drive and retailer your complete working system in your VRAM (do you have to wish to). Effectively-known Home windows modder NTDEV has demonstrated how, and it is surprisingly painless.
The first step is to create a RAM drive in your GPU’s reminiscence. A VRAM drive, if you’ll. There’s an open-source device that may do it for you referred to as GpuRamDrive. It solely takes a pair clicks however the device was deserted earlier than it reached stability, so that you may must attempt it just a few occasions.
Step two is to make use of your decide of instruments to create a digital machine. NTDEV used Home windows’ baked-in Hyper-V supervisor, which is a straightforward but highly effective device for spawning digital machines accessible to Home windows 10 and 11 Professional, Schooling, and Enterprise customers. You will want to vary simply a few defaults in Hyper-V, and you’ll decide these out in NTDEV’s video.
When you have an RTX 4090 or RX 7900 XTX or a GPU with greater than 20 GB of VRAM then you need to have the ability to squeeze a vanilla Home windows 11 set up onto the VRAM drive you created. When you did not drop a grand on a brand new GPU this previous 12 months, you may have to make use of an alternate working system with much less demanding storage necessities. NTDEV makes use of Tiny11, a stripped-down model of Home windows 11 that he created.
We wrote about Tiny11 when it was launched in February. Marketed as Home windows 11 with out the bloat, its fundamental objective is to scale back Home windows 11’s system necessities with out sacrificing too many options. It strikes a very good stability and even finds room for staple apps like MS Paint. Whereas it wants about 8 GB of storage to run on naked steel, NTDEV exhibits that it will possibly run on a 3.5 GB drive when it is used for a digital machine.
NTDEV demo’d the idea on a laptop computer geared up with an RTX 3050 with 4 GB of GDDR6. He confirmed that the digital machine had no drawback creating and saving recordsdata to the 600 MB of free house he had. When he ran the CrystalDiskMark benchmark, he reached strong speeds of two GB/s studying and a couple of.5 GB/s writing, on par with PCIe 3.0 NVMe drives.
I can not consider a single purpose why anybody would wish to run Home windows 11 on their VRAM. And but, it is astonishingly sensible: fast to arrange and seemingly as quick and secure as a daily digital machine. Why not, then, I suppose?