I still see Resizable BAR disabled on many PCs, and it is quietly costing people free GPU performance
Back in late 2020/early 2021, both Nvidia and AMD launched Resizable BAR (ReBAR), or Smart Access Memory (SAM), which was meant to give the GPU a boost in gaming performance. Although the feature had been part of the PCIe standard since the late 2000s, it had gone largely unused until the RX 6000 and RTX 30 series formally rolled it out. ReBAR doesn't exactly increase your GPU's raw performance, but optimizes VRAM usage and the CPU-GPU communication to ensure your gaming performance isn't held back. Still, five years after ReBAR became common on modern PCs, I still come across customer builds and friends' PCs where it's mysteriously disabled in the firmware. Gamers either don't know about it or aren't aware that it's disabled on their systems. Since the performance difference isn't drastic enough to alert you that something's off, it can go undetected for years. On Intel GPUs, ReBAR is basically non-negotiable, so you should confirm if...
Back in late 2020/early 2021, both Nvidia and AMD launched Resizable BAR (ReBAR), or Smart Access Memory (SAM), which was meant to give the GPU a boost in gaming performance. Although the feature had been part of the PCIe standard since the late 2000s, it had gone largely unused until the RX 6000 and RTX 30 series formally rolled it out. ReBAR doesn’t exactly increase your GPU’s raw performance, but optimizes VRAM usage and the CPU-GPU communication to ensure your gaming performance isn’t held back. Still, five years after ReBAR became common on modern PCs, I still come across customer builds and friends’ PCs where it’s mysteriously disabled in the firmware. Gamers either don’t know about it or aren’t aware that it’s disabled on their systems. Since the performance difference isn’t drastic enough to alert you that something’s off, it can go undetected for years. On Intel GPUs, ReBAR is basically non-negotiable, so you should confirm if it’s enabled in your UEFI.
Daniel Martinez
Dallas
Dallas
Published by: aplhsindia.in
