What is virtual RAM? Can you use the internal storage of your smartphone as your RAM?

Smartphones are evolving constantly so as the increment in RAM consumption. Nowadays smartphone games have become RAM hungry and require 6-8 gigs . RAM management has become challenging for smartphone manufacturers these days. To address the demand , Companies have come up with a new feature called “Virtual RAM ” with the use of DRE technology. Recently companies like OnePlus, Vivo, and Realme introduced Dynamic RAM Expansion (DRE) technology that lets the phone use a certain portion of internal storage as RAM. Vivo claims that users can use up to 3 GB of internal storage as virtual ram in its latest x60 flagships and OnePlus is doing the same. Xiaomi is rumored to introduce this feature in miui 12.5. The concept seems quite interesting and useful, but let’s find out what virtual RAM or Dynamic ram expansion means? How different is it from your regular RAM on phones? and how effective it is?

DRE stands as the short form of dynamic ram expansion technology which uses the internal storage as a ram to store information for a short time It is a basic memory management approach where secondary memory can be used as a part of the main memory. We have seen this technology much earlier in laptops and PC’s and the same technology have come to mobile devices.