Comment by zozbot234

The main blocker with swapping is not even the limited bandwidth, it's actually the extreme write workload on data elements such as the per-layer model activations - and, to a much lesser extent, the KV-cache. In contrast, there are elements such as inactive experts for highly sparse MoE models, where swapping makes sense since any given expert will probably be unused. You're better off using that VRAM/RAM for something else. So the logic of "reserve VRAM for the highest-value uses, use system RAM as a second tier, finally use storage as a last resort or for read-only data" is still quite valid.