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Today we’re testing out the newly supported Resizable BAR feature on Nvidia GeForce GPUs by benchmarking an Asus ROG Strix RTX 3080 OC graphics card. Resizable BAR became part of the GPU performance conversation with the release of AMD’s Radeon RX 6000 series. AMD was touting a new feature called Smart Access Memory or
SAM, but in reality AMD had just rebranded a PCI Express feature, known as Resizable BAR that had gone unused for quite some time.
The way AMD promoted and implemented Resizable BAR on Radeon 6000 GPUs, it required to be paired with a Ryzen 5000 series CPU and newer 500 series motherboard. AMD made it sound as if this was a new optimization they had developed and would be exclusive to their products, but that s not the case. The claim was your AMD CPU/GPU combo could produce a performance uplift of 10% or greater in a number of games with SAM enabled, creating some buzz, but it was short lived after all.
Resizable BAR first hit the mainstream back in November, when AMD released its RX 6000-series to the market. It took Nvidia until February to catch up, with the RTX 3060 supporting Resizable BAR out of the box. At the end of March, Nvidia also released a new driver to support the technology on the rest of its RTX 30-series GPUs. Here, we benchmark the RTX 3080 and RTX 3090 to see what Resizable BAR can bring to the table.
Watch the video via our VIMEO Channel (Below) or over on YouTube at 2160p HERE
The following compatibility notes are correct as of April 14th 2021, based on information provided by Nvidia HERE.
ASUS Z370/Z390 board owners are furious over the lack of Resizable BAR support
Apr 8, 2021 05:20 EDT with 15 comments
The PCIe Resizable BAR (ReBAR) feature was first introduced by AMD last year dubbed as Smart Access Memory and since then rivals Intel and Nvidia have also added support for it. Various graphics card AIBs and motherboard vendors have also been gradually rolling out firmware updates to enable the feature. ASUS motherboard owners however are annoyed because the company hasn t yet released any such BIOS to add support for ReBAR on its older high-end Z390 and Z370 chipsets even though others like MSI and Gigabyte are doing so.