Nvidia updates the Geforce RTX 3000 series with Resizable BAR

With the Radeon RX 6000 family, AMD provided support for Smart Access Memory (SAM) with its own Ryzen 5000 series processors. When SweClockers tested the technology, we saw performance gains that averaged eight percent in our performance index for 4K UHD resolution. The technology officially only works with the above-mentioned combination, together with a motherboard with a control circuit from the 500 series.

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► SweClocker’s test of Smart Access Memory

When Nvidia presents its news during CES 2021, they concretize the plans for the rollout of Resizable BAR, a technology that is included in the PCI Express standard but has not been used before. However, the company’s graphics card has support at the hardware level and already in November last year, future support for the technology was promised.

Nvidia’s implementation simply requires a motherboard, for either Intel or AMD, which has support for activating Resizable BAR in the motherboard’s UEFI. No promised performance gains are visible in the company’s press release, however, Nvidia is talking about a driver update that will be ready in February.

In addition to the driver, a VBIOS update of the graphics card is also required and these updates are expected to be launched by partner manufacturers in March. In addition to support for graphics cards in desktops, support for laptops equipped with the recently unveiled Geforce RTX 3000 series for laptops is also promised.

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The technology defines the limit of how large memory blocks of the graphics card memory are effectively accessible to the processor over the PCI Express bus. These blocks have previously been limited to 256 MB, a remnant of the time with 32-bit operating systems. In addition to lifting the size limit, support for several simultaneous calls to memory is introduced at the same time, where previous technology has previously forced multiple calls to be queued.

Resizable BAR was available as early as 2010 in connection with the specification for PCI Express 3.0 being nailed down. Why it took ten years for graphics card manufacturers to use the feature has not yet been revealed, but as expected, enthusiasts do not say no to a little extra “free” performance where possible.