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Convert Unneeded VRAM Into A Storage Device

Posted by timothy on from the welcome-to-the-bizarroworld dept.

Pawel Kot writes "Have you ever thought why does your graphics card has so much memory? Do You think you have not enough RAM or awfully slow swap file? Do you need fast ram-disk or diskless machine? Go for it! Take one of these cheap 128MB graphics cards and enjoy the speed. Michal Schulz wrote a good description on how to take the advantage of not used video card memory."

6 of 239 comments (clear)

  1. I can't help but think.... by Julius+X · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Isn't this a bit wasteful? I mean you can buy 128mb of memory for a LOT cheaper than one of those "ultra cheap 128mb graphics cards".

    I'll stick with buying RAM and using my graphics card for what it was designed for. Besides...this only applies to X users anyway.

    --

    -Julius X
    remove "-whatkindofspamdoyoutakemefor-" from email to send
  2. Dur... by Loligo · · Score: 5, Insightful


    If you're THAT low on memory, you're not likely to have a 128 meg video card.

    Or a 64 meg card, even.

    -l

  3. Wow! Useful AS! by Kragg · · Score: 5, Funny

    Cool! Finally I have somewhere to store my Quake 3 savegames - on the spare memory of my laptop's 16meg graphics card!

    Or maybe not...

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  4. Next week on Slashdot... by ergo98 · · Score: 5, Funny

    ...How to use that "cheap" P4 as a, err, inexpensive coffee warmer.

  5. Re:What the hell can I do with that? by Ed+Avis · · Score: 5, Informative

    VRAM can be read and written at the same time - at least on the video card. And it should be possible to use the video hardware to blit around chunks of memory very quickly. I wonder if there are any algorithms (apart from those to manipulate a bitmapped display) which could be specially coded to take advantage of this hardware?

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    -- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
  6. Re:What the hell can I do with that? by not_cub · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Yes there are. I attempted to write a program to find the weak Schur numbers using this (I needed to bitshift bit arrays larger than 32-bits a lot, and I figured a way that a video card could do this well, especially on this problem). The real problem with this approach was the bandwidth back to the processor mentioned in a slashdot article not so long ago. Most consumer video cards just aren't designed to send data back to the processor fast.

    not_cub

    --
    q='echo "q=$s$q$s;s=$b$s;b=$b$b;$q"';s=\';b=\\;echo "q=$s$q$s;s=$b$s;b=$b$b;$q"