Nvidia answers AMD’s Smart Access Memory with its own boost to frame rates

Nvidia resizable BAR.

Nvidia is officially launching its own resizable BAR support, which promises increased performance gains in some games. Resizable BAR has been part of the PCI Express specification for years, but AMD only recently made it an important feature to support with the introduction of Smart Access Memory.

AMD’s Smart Access Memory effectively provides its Ryzen 5000 processors direct access to the GPU memory to bypass I/O bottlenecks. This allows CPUs to access the full graphics frame buffer, instead of being limited to reading 256MB blocks. AMD previously promised up to 10 percent extra performance in certain games — if you pair its new Ryzen 5000 CPUs with its latest Ryzen RX 6000 graphics cards.

Intel and Nvidia have seemingly now worked together to enable this same feature on the Intel side, with Nvidia promising it will feature in its new RTX 3000 series laptops with 3rd-gen Max-Q technologies. Max-Q has traditionally been about a slightly cooler, quieter class of laptop GPU that can fit in a thinner laptop with enhanced cooling, so it’s interesting to see this bundled with that. Hopefully, the tech will be coming to desktop GPU / processor combinations as well.


AMD
AMD’s Smart Access Memory support.

Resizable BAR support on the AMD side has led to some interesting results. TechSpot tested a variety of games recently using Smart Access Memory, and found that performance improvements really depend on games. Some titles saw nearly a 20 percent boost at 1440p and 4K, while others actually dropped in performance.

Developing…

Source: The Verge

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