We return to talk about Intel Arc Alchemist and in particular of desktop graphics cards, for which, according to the same company from Santa Clara, it is absolutely essential to enable the Resizable Bar functionality. Recall that Resizable BAR allows the CPU to have access to all GB of the graphics card's VRAM, improving performance in some workloads with a variable impact depending on the application. While it has long been a standard feature of the PCI Express interface, it wasn't particularly important until AMD introduced Smart Access Memory (SAM) technology with its Radeon RX 6000 graphics cards.
Already in the past, according to some benchmarks carried out on the Arc A380 model, the drop in performance obtained by disabling this option was quite evident. Apparently, unlike AMD and NVIDIA, which took the time to optimize memory management to cope with PCI-Express's 256MB slots (instead of using the entire graphics memory as a single addressable block), the Intel-designed management model is based on fast, large transfers, which makes it necessary to activate Resizable Bar. For this reason, the company, despite claiming to be working on optimizing drivers to try to reduce this problem on configurations without this possibility, at the moment he recommends, to those who have older platforms, to turn to other manufacturers.
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