"VRAM" is Video RAM, not Virtual RAM/memory. Definitely an important acronym not to mix up because they do very different things.
That being said I would absolutely not recommend trying to rely on Virtual Memory during rendering. It will slow things down *massively* once the RAM usage switches to virtual, on-disk "memory".
Readyboost mostly helps for bootup and program startup, and other frequently accessed small files. It doesn't work like virtual memory. It is intended to cache very specific, frequently used (and relatively small) things, in general. It's interesting that your experience has been it has helped with your rendering, but you are working in an extremely constrained environment (by modern rendering standards), so fair enough.
I'd sooner look at optimizing the render settings or scene elements to reduce memory usage for this scene. Minimize population areas (which are often larger than they need to be, especially if no masking is being used), use simpler population object geometry, or downsample textures to lower resolution, minimize the number of render elements in use, reduce Micropoly Detail and/or AA if possible, etc.
- Oshyan