Is it possible to use GPU memory as more main memory?

Question

I have a ATI Graphics Card with 1G of RAM. GPU-Z says that 143MB (dedicated) and 75MB (dynamic) is being used on the card (GPU).

Is it possible to get your PC to use GPU as more RAM (main memory) for normal usage?

Or can you get your PC to be make more use of GPU memory to increase performance?

Answer 1

The answer for "normal usage" for a discrete/PCIe/AGP/etc. GPU is simply: "no" and the reason is that it is a physical wired issue as the CPU doesn't have the same access to it as with DDR RAM plugged into the motherboard (I'm not going to go into the details with NUMA but it's the same issue, just a tad different)

The comment about GPU RAM as swap will provide you "virtual ram" that should be faster than USB/SATA/disk based virtual RAM... it called swap space/paging file etc. depending on the OS in use.

HOWEVER the question as asked mentioning "dedicated" and "shared" is indicative of APU/onboard/onchip type GPUs and that is different, as they actually DO share the CPU's RAM, and there you have options in BIOS/etc. to set how much of CPU/GPU shared RAM is allocated to the GPU (and thus not "available" for the CPU)

Answer 2

Now in 2017 there is a new project up here:

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

Answer 3

One way to increase performance drastically for many things is to use AMD Radeon RAMDisk. This technology allows you to make RAM disks out of our Video Memory.

I have tested this and is excellent for many situations: games, programs that have many small files, programs that make heavy disk reads/writes.

Allocating it as system RAM is not currently possible under any version of Windows.