[Hardware] Tiny11, A Toned-Down Version of Windows 11, Can Run On A GPU With 4 GB VRAM

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The lightweight version of Windows 11, known as Tiny11, can be run entirely off of a GPU's VRAM as demoed by NTDEV.

Windows 11 Without The Bloat "Tiny 11" Can Easily Run On A GPU's VRAM

Microsoft's Windows 11 OS has a lot of features and functions but hardly any real consumer would ever make use of all of these at once. Certain features will appear as bloat to users & a lightweight version of the OS exists in the form of Tiny11 which not only tones down the requirements making it run on older systems but also gets rid of the aforementioned bloat and clutter that is associated with the standard Windows 11 OS.

Recently, the lower size of the Tiny11 OS has made many users try to run it on various hardware. A few months ago, NTDEV managed to make the entire OS run and work on 384 MB of RAM while a different user managed to run it on just 200 MB of RAM.

While the OS was able to boot, the lower resources meant that you couldn't do much else at all besides looking at your achievement in the task manager. However, loading the OS off of the ram opened up room for more experiments and that's how NTDEV ended up using the GPU's VRAM for their next project.

Using the GpuRamDrive project, NTDEV was able to store and load the entire Tiny11 OS onto the VRAM of a GPU. The GPU used for this demo was the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 Laptop which has a total of 4 GB VRAM. It's really impressive because the OS was running smoothly but the entire pool of memory was in use alongside system ram. Although Tiny11 OS requires 2 GB memory, storing it up on the VRAM and loading it from the same location will put a burden on the VRAM pool.

If you want, you can use a higher-end GPU with a wider bus interface for better performance using the same tool. Modern GPUs come with over 10 GB of VRAM so that should be enough to do some light-weight tasks however running games will be bit difficult if you're running below 20 GB VRAM since you'd have to install them on the same available space as the OS on the VRAM.

With that said, the 4 GB of GPU VRAM is very fast compared to the RAM and storage devices since it operates at much faster bandwidths. As the primary storage device for the Tiny11 OS, the storage performance came out spectacular with sequential reads of up to 1960 MB/s & writes of up to 2497 MB/s. Once again, the OS was in use on the same pool so performance could've been better. This goes off to show that Tiny11 OS can be a good alternative for users who don't have the required PC hardware to run the standard OS but are accustomed to the new Windows 11 interface and certain features that it offers.

https://wccftech.com/tiny11-toned-down-version-of-windows-11-can-run-on-a-gpu-with-4-gb-vram/