Well, that does at least answer my immediate question about why I would ever swap from expensive RAM to really expensive RAM:) Feels niche, but when you want it it's a good idea.
Edit: Although, this is predicated on the system being able to release VRAM that is acting as swap when it's time to start a game. Can it do that?
>Sequential throughput: ~1.3 GB/s
[on a RTX 3070 Laptop]
This RTX 3070 chip is on PCIe 4.0 x16 which should give 64GB/s. The 8GB of GDDR6 is 448GB/s.
Swapping to an NVMe drive would be twice as fast, but with higher latency.
With X11 it's not that bad (buffers are pre-allocated), but with Wayland allocations are a lot more dynamic, so running low on VRAM can easily crash the whole desktop. I just had a few of such crashes with Hyprland+llama-server+KVM switching between computers without freeing VRAM.
sounds VERY low, also, wouldn't random read/write speed be MUCH more relevant here?
Well, GPUs also have stupid amounts of compute on them. I have to imagine that there is some kind of database format that's useful with GPU compute attached.
Since the data is already in VRAM, the GPU can sort, join, or otherwise manipulate data as needed.
I believe within 2-3 years databases and data warehouses on GPU will be common. The widespread use of agents to query data will be a part of this, as there will be a need to run far more queries at lower latency than needed for the ETL and BI workloads of the past.
This HN comment and the linked post brought up a lot of good points. The main takeaway is that swap should primarily be considered a mechanism for equality of reclamation, not for emergency extra memory, where equality of reclamation means file-backed pages and anonymous pages are subject to similar criteria for being evicted from physical memory.
I used to have zero swap on my Linux desktop and this convinced me to add at least a small swap partition.
[0]: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/its-one-banana-michael-what-c...
Now if it could be dynamically used and vacated on other GPU workloads?
Hard drives that huge scare me as it would take days to backup all the data off them.