I can't think of a single reason why anyone would want to run Windows 11 on their VRAM. When he ran the CrystalDiskMark benchmark, he reached solid speeds of 2 GB/s reading and 2.5 GB/s writing, on par with PCIe 3.0 NVMe drives. He showed that the virtual machine had no problem creating and saving files to the 600 MB of free space he had. NTDEV demo'd the concept on a laptop equipped with an RTX 3050 with 4 GB of GDDR6. While it needs about 8 GB of storage to run on bare metal, NTDEV shows that it can run on a 3.5 GB drive when it's used for a virtual machine.

It strikes a good balance and even finds room for staple apps like MS Paint. Advertised as Windows 11 without the bloat, its main goal is to reduce Windows 11's system requirements without sacrificing too many features. We wrote about Tiny11 when it was released in February. NTDEV uses Tiny11, a stripped-down version of Windows 11 that he created. If you didn't drop a grand on a new GPU this past year, you'll have to use an alternate operating system with less demanding storage requirements.

If you have an RTX 4090 or RX 7900 XTX or a GPU with more than 20 GB of VRAM then you should be able to squeeze a vanilla Windows 11 installation onto the VRAM drive you created. RTX 3050 (desktop) with four of the eight memory slots populated. You'll need to change just a couple of defaults in Hyper-V, and you can pick those out in NTDEV's video. NTDEV used Windows' baked-in Hyper-V manager, which is a simple yet powerful tool for spawning virtual machines available to Windows 10 and 11 Pro, Education, and Enterprise users. Step two is to use your pick of tools to create a virtual machine. It only takes a couple clicks but the tool was abandoned before it reached stability, so you might need to try it a few times. There's an open-source tool that can do it for you called GpuRamDrive. Step one is to create a RAM drive in your GPU's memory. Well-known Windows modder NTDEV has demonstrated how, and it's surprisingly painless. WTF?! Now you can bypass your hard drive and store your whole operating system in your VRAM (should you want to).

Windows 11 virtual machine