Recently, ASUS enabled Re-Sizable BAR, marketed as “Smart Memory Access” or simply SAM on its Intel Z490 motherboards. This technology is part of the PCIe 3.0 spec and allows for a wider interconnect between the VRAM buffer and the CPU, improving performance in bandwidth starved situations:
Although AMD originally marketed it as an exclusive tech, turn out it’s compatible with all present and next-gen CPUs and GPUs from Intel as well as NVIDIA. Japanese outlet, ASCII got a chance to test it on the Intel platform and got some interesting results:
Paired with a Core i9-10900K, the Radeon RX 6800 XT saw a boost of as much as 16% with SAM enabled. The highest improvement was seen in Forza Horizon 4 (DX12), followed by Assassins’ Creed: Valhalla. Both games saw a double digit increase in the average frame rates as well as smoother frame times. RDR2 also had its minimum frame rate significantly increased with SAM enabled, all the way from 33 FPS to 94 FPS. (cnchealthplan.com)
Considering these scores, it looks like Re-Sizable BAR or SAM as AMD calls it will have a more notable improvement in performance as more and more developers optimize their games for it.
