You can install and run Crysis 3 on a GeForce RTX 3090's VRAM

(Image credit: Strife)

On the one hand, here's Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, now too large to fit on a 250GB SSD. And on the other hand, here's Crysis 3, running on a Geforce RTX 3090's VRAM. Hits a bit different, yeah?

I installed Crysis 3 on my graphics card!I used some VRAMdrive software called GPU Ram Drive, made a 15GB NTFS partition on the GPU, then installed Crysis 3 on itAt 4K very high settings get good fps and the game loads very fast - GPU-Z reports total VRAM use 20434MB pic.twitter.com/lLcQsD5JYMOctober 4, 2020

The shiny new RTX 3090 has a 24GB frame buffer, and that's how software engineer Strife got Crysis 3 running on it, as she demonstrated on Twitter, by setting up a 15GB partition to install the game on, with plenty of graphics memory left over for a game from 2013. As she explained on Reddit, "There's no benefit to it really except I found it really funny, load times are pretty much the same as on a fast NVME drive, was hoping it would be faster but there is probably some weird bottleneck like this instead of doing it the 'proper' storage API way".

Sure, that's pretty impressive. But can it run Crysis?

Here's our review of the RTX 3090 Founder's Edition.

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.