You people might like to make fun of the engineer who put an entire game in VRAM and then played it from there, but I had the idea to preinstall game assets to VRAM years ago, and once GPUs gain persistent RAM, it is a no brainer

Not everything that sounds silly is useless, damn it. Sometimes it is progress in the making.

? Why would you load CPU code from VRAM, it's much slower for the CPU than standard DRAM. And GPU memory systems suck for CPU type accesses. It's just how they're built. And expressing your game logic as SIMT for a GPU is going to turn into pain very very fast.

Also persistence is usually not given to RAM because adding it usually means lowering speed either by changing the technology or adding extra persistence mechanisms. The whole point of RAM is speed.

@RememberMe True, it was a hack, but preinstalling game assets makes a lot of sense if you're going to play the same game a lot.
The CPU code obviously doesn't belong there..

Also google persistent memory, it's new and it runs almost as fast as RAM but with persistence. I imagine in a few years we'll have it tiered between volatile RAM and cold storage. Basically disk drives and "regular" SSDs are going to become obsolete.

@mxpil you mean 3D xpoint, what Intel calls Optane? That's already a thing and it's already used as a cache between RAM and SSDs, but I don't see it replacing DRAM for a while at least.

Of course with any major change in technology there's going to be a change in opinion. I'm talking about currently available tech.

Ye olde RAM tech isn't anywhere near done, for example, look at HBM and other 3D stacked memories (though they're generally more useful for graphics and accelerators).

Eh, are you sure about preinstalling assets? It takes seconds to transfer stuff to VRAM, and you usually want to keep transferring things in and out. Persistent storage in VRAM is going to eat up space uselessly if all of that is not being used currently. So you'd need much much bigger GPU memories and I'm not sure if that helps.

@mxpil I'm not saying it's a pointless idea as such, it just doesn't make sense with how the system is designed currently. I imagine if someone were to design the kind of system you're talking about, keeping game assets in "VRAM" is perfectly logical and people would do just that. But given how VRAM is architected and used right now...nah.

I'm sure you agree there's no universally good or bad way, just the way that we do things right now and ways to change it if an underlying assumption (like tech) changes.

Octane is one step but there is more experimental stuff in existence.

Once you have a 64GB card you can cache optimized versions of assets on it, which will allow fast loading and bigger assets. Levels take minutes to load even from SSD.

@mxpil
On what hardware take levels of wich games _minutes_ to load?
That sounds like one order of magnitude too long.

@mxpil as a man who prefers Low/Medium to Ultra... uh, no? What game would require minutes to load a level (and isn't a Bethesda/EA/Ubisoft game?)