NVIDIA
NVIDIA today announced that Resizable Base Address Register (BAR) support is now available for GeForce RTX 3060 graphics cards and RTX 30 Mobile series GPUs. Its arrival is even earlier than previously expected by the company, but for the other desktop models it will be necessary to wait until the end of March. AMD was the first to bring Resizable BAR support to the market, proposing it as Smart Access Memory, but the technology is actually part of the PCIe specification. The functionality was extended to the Intel Z490 platform in December 2020 and the company from Santa Clara said a few weeks ago that it is ready to support NVIDIA graphics cards as soon as it is possible.Recall that Resizable BAR serves the purpose to allow the CPU to efficiently access the entire frame buffer by enabling the necessary transfers of textures, shaders and geometric elements that can be processed simultaneously rather than queued. The end result is superior performance, although its impact may vary by software.
Fredrik Hamberger, Intel's General Manager for the premium notebook and gaming segments, said Resizable support BAR could lead to a 5-10% performance boost in some games, but NVIDIA said the performance benefits can vary greatly from game to game, as some titles actually performed worse. This last factor has led the company to test the titles in advance and use game profiles to enable Resizable BAR only in cases where it leads to a positive impact on the number of fps. For this reason, RTX cards currently only support eight titles, including Assassin’s Creed Valhalla and Red Dead Redemption 2, with the driver released yesterday.
NVIDIA plans to expand Resizable BAR's support for more games when the functionality is extended to other RTX 30 series graphics cards next month. For now, however, it seems that only a small part of its users will benefit from it.
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Nvidia starts boosting frame rates by up to 10 percent on 30-series GPUs
© Photo by Sam Byford / The VergeNvidia has started to roll out support for Resizable BAR, a feature of PCI Express that can boost frame rates in certain games by up to 10 percent. The new RTX 3060 graphics card is the first to include Resizable BAR, which allows certain CPUs to access the full graphics frame buffer, instead of being limited to reading just 256MB blocks. Support for other 30-series GPUs will be available in late March.
You’ll need the right CPU, motherboard, and graphics card to utilize this new feature, and Nvidia is working with both AMD and Intel to provide chipset support. AMD’s 400 and 500 Series CPUs are supported, alongside Intel’s 10th Gen processors and the company’s upcoming 11th Gen S chips.
Much like AMD’s Smart Access Memory, Resizable BAR on Nvidia GPUs can boost frame rates in certain games by up to 10 percent. The boost is really game dependent, and resolution can also impact how much performance will increase. “In our testing, we’ve found some titles benefit from a few percent, up to 10 percent,” says Nvidia. “However, there are also titles that see a decrease in performance.”
Nvidia is pre-testing titles and using special game profiles to enable Resizable BAR only where the performance increases. The following games are currently supported:
Additional games will be supported in late March, when Nvidia launches VIOS updates for the rest of its 30-series GPUs. Nvidia will supply VBIOS updates for all Founders Edition 30-series cards, and board partners will also release their own updates. You’ll also need a motherboard update that includes the necessary CPU support, and Nvidia says Asus, Asrock, Colorful, Evga, Gigabyte, and MSI have all started supporting Resizable BAR on select motherboards.
Resizable BAR support on the AMD side has been tested widely, and TechSpot found that some games making use of Smart Access Memory could see nearly a 20 percent boost at 1440p and 4K.