Reduce RAM footprint by offloading to VRAM

[dzjorrit]

Firefox is the biggest consumer of my RAM. With RAM prices being ridiculous high at the moment it would be nice to look for other options
Many people who have bought more expensive notebooks have dedicated GPUs, but most of the time you are not using this GPU and the VRAM connected to it. There are usually many Gigabytes of VRAM available. It is easy to read and write to VRAM using the OpenCL interface supported by every dedicated GPU.
It would be very useful to offload the RAM being used by inactive tabs to VRAM so more RAM becomes available to active processes.

[Jon]

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[c0d3h4x0r]

This sounds like a terrible idea. Now I would have to worry about Firefox eating up my more limited and precious VRAM than my main RAM while trying to play a game with Firefox open in the background. It would be incredibly non-obvious that your games fail to start with "not enough VRAM" errors because Firefox is open in the background.

The real fix to Firefox's RAM usage is to optimize Firefox's memory footprint and disable by default a bunch of unneeded and unwanted "features" (Pocket, AI, telemetry, etc.) that nobody asked for.

[dzjorrit]

Of course you would not enable this feature when you are playing games regularly.
But there are many people who never or seldom use their dGPU, the VRAM is always sitting their doing nothing, why not use it for something useful?
I bought an expensive laptop because I wanted a 4k screen, but I never play games or other tasks that require a dGPU. The VRAM is never used.