sometimes you don't realize what you're missing until it's staring you in the face but
when you notice it it's just
so sweet isn't it well
that's what we finally have here today with NVIDIA the opportunity to have our
cake and eat it too because they have finally enabled resizable bar on their
desktop GeForce gpus get it resizable
bar extra sweetness
in theory this is a simple driver update that will unlock extra performance on
your existing GPU assuming you're lucky enough to own one but what we're gonna
find out is if it is truly something for nothing
or if it's just an illusion
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Linus
resizable bar has been a big deal ever since AMD announced their implementation
of the feature called smart access memory if you haven't been keeping up
with all the buzz it basically allows a CPU to access all of a pci express
device's memory at once rather than in small 256 megabyte chunks as has been
the case until now resizable bar has existed in the data center for some time
now but it couldn't find momentum on the desktop until AMD kicked off this
scramble to implement it industry-wide which kind of raises the question why
now well in the early days of pci express it
wasn't a problem for gamers because game assets like textures were sized
proportionally to the video frame buffers of that time but with the
complexity of today's games and with modern graphics cards having as much as
24 gigabytes of onboard memory you can
easily imagine a situation where the CPU could waste a lot of cycles getting the
data it needs if it can only address 256
megabytes at a time ultimately eliminating this waste is where our
performance boost comes from the only problem is that in order to support it
every device in the chain needs to be capable the CPU the motherboard and the
pci express device which in this case is a GPU now we've already looked at
NVIDIA's preliminary implementation of resizable bar on mobile GeForce gpus
with an MSI ge76 raider laptop and at
the time we concluded that there was more to the sometimes impressive
performance improvements that AMD was getting than just enabling resizable bar
and we also concluded that NVIDIA had some work to do before it was ready for
prime time but even with it fully cooked it's important to know that not every
game or application will benefit and how the driver handles memory management
appears to play a major role in what kind of performance uplift or fall you
can expect that's where NVIDIA's latest drivers and the free chocolate come in
our previous investigation showed that the impact differs depending on CPU
performance so we grabbed both a ryzen 5
5600x and a ryzen 9 5900x to represent
the mid-range and the high end we'll be using a GeForce rtx 3080 and for comparison
against team red we've got a Radeon rx 6800 xt
something to note is that because we're focused on their respective improvements
over stock performance and not on completely re-reviewing these cards all
of the results for both sides will be in relative percentages at 1080p things are
already really interesting shadow of the tomb raider doesn't change much but
where Radeon loses some performance in the five percent lows on ryzen 9 GeForce
gains hinting that NVIDIA might be doing a better job of reducing die to die
latency on AMD's own CPU than AMD's
graphics team is gta 5 on the other hand gives GeForce a hard time with Radeon
gaining a bit with verizon 5 which further hints that AMD's implementation
favors single die cpus as for f1 2020 this is one of NVIDIA's
call outs for performance uplift and it brings the first major victory for
resizable bar we ended up with slightly higher average frame times across the
board for team green which is bad but significantly lower one percent minimum
frame times that reach toward a 10 improvement on the 5900x that's good
because in almost any game improving performance during challenging scenes is
way more important than when animations are already smooth this is especially
true in competitive titles when performance tends to fall in the heat of
battle because of all the character models and effects that are on screen
again NVIDIA seems to be taking better advantage of the extra course on the
ryzen 9. forza horizon 4 is another call
out and another win for NVIDIA although the pattern flips here with the ryzen 5
pulling better improvements across the board than the ryzen 9. this suggests
that memory access patterns play a significant role in whether the die
arrangement causes issues Radeon on the other hand struggles especially with the
ryzen 9 where minimum frame rates are as much as six percent lower than with
resizable bar disabled which brings us back to our chocolate analogy doesn't it
it's perhaps unsurprising that there's little change on flight sim 2020 given
how CPU-bound that game is but NVIDIA does manage to eke out a slight
improvement with ryzen 5 while Radeon manages a bit better frame rates on
ryzen 9. and assassin's creed valhalla was the call-out title that we found
improvements for in our previous video and that continues today NVIDIA pulls a
respectable six to nine percent improvement across the board but then
again that pales in comparison to team red pulling way ahead of stock with up
to 18 percent higher performance given
the way that both teams are going back and forth here it seems like additional
optimizations can still be made for resizable bar on both sides which is
really promising finally cs go it's an older title that already runs well on
hardware of this caliber but we still managed to see a slight improvement in
minimum frame rates at the cost of some average FPS which is a price that most
players should be willing to pay for the reasons that i outlined before there is
no price by the way for the new sticker packs at lttstore.com free with every
order checkmate NVIDIA moving on to 1440p you might not expect
things to get better here but you'd be wrong while g4 stays more or less the
same in shadow of the tomb raider Radeon pulls two to four percent ahead with
ryzen 5. and where GeForce loses in
minimum frame rates for no gain on ryzen 9 Radeon manages to gain about as many
average frames as it loses in minimums which in a non-competitive title like
this one might be an okay trade-off gta 5 is a bit all over the place with ryzen
5 more or less on par with stock performance on both teams with a slight
tip to Radeon and ryzen 9 pulling as much of a win on g-force as Radeon loses
it's almost like NVIDIA stole the frames right out of lisa sue's pocket and f1
2020 again shows improvements as high as 13
with the only maybe regression coming from NVIDIA's average frame rates on
ryzen 9 but we're talking a mere one percent difference NVIDIA comes out
ahead in performance improvements for minimum frame rates here while Radeon
pulls better averages as for forza there is no other way to put it it is a
staggering win for Radeon their worst improvement here is 13 and yes your eyes
are working fine that is a nearly 20 gain for Radeon's minimum frame rates
now to be clear NVIDIA still wins everybody wins when they go over 100 of
stock performance they just don't win as hard now with a little extra emphasis on
the GPU thanks to our higher resolution flight sim 2020 shows us near universal
improvements with Radeon actually pulling a healthy 8 improvement in
minimum frame rates on ryzen 9. and then assassin's creed is once again a bigger
win for AMD than it is for NVIDIA with improvements reaching 16 for both cpus
and NVIDIA managing a very respectable six to nine percent lead over stock
performance isn't it nice when everybody wins guys too bad it doesn't always work
out that way cs go at 1440p resulted in
straight up performance regressions across the board with the sole exception
being minimum frame rates on ryzen 9 for Radeon GeForce takes the worst of it
though here with up to a 20 performance loss with resizable bar enabled that's
as big a loss as the largest gains we've seen today maybe that's why NVIDIA's
driver has an easy to find indicator for whether the feature is active i guess
AMD felt it was less likely that users with it enabled would be troubleshooting
performance looking at the big picture here though
Radeon has the best average gains running roughly six percent faster than
stock at 1440p and two percent faster at 1080p while NVIDIA's gains hover around
two percent regardless of the resolution that means one of two things either
AMD's memory management for Radeon is worse than NVIDIA's for GeForce or
NVIDIA has some more optimization work to do the work they've done already
since our previous video has clearly paid off handsomely though so either way
it goes we'll hopefully keep on seeing improvements with future driver
revisions on both sides on that subject by the way get subscribed because NVIDIA
finally rolled the driver that fixes the code 43 error and we're gonna be all
over that in a future video changing gears a bit by now we know that
productivity tends not to be affected much by resizable bar at least for AMD
but for fun we did some runs so that we could validate that for NVIDIA as well
blender well uh it's 100
yep 100 of stock performance so how about that pugetvent shows some dips
especially in after effects although which CPU causes the dip changes
depending on which team GPU you're batting for and then luxmark shows
basically flat with our ryzen 9 g-force combo managing to lose some performance
this clearly isn't the norm but it's worth taking into account that some
applications may suffer for those sweet sweet gaming games
so then resizable bar should you turn it on assuming that your
motherboard manufacturer has rolled out a BIOS with support and that you have a
compatible GPU the answer is yes
we found that so far there are more situations where it helps than
situations where it hurts and like with our chocolate bar where it hurts the
benefits of the tasty snack seem far more noticeable than what went missing
now if only they could enable it for previous gen gpus
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for watching guys go check out our previous investigation into resizable
bar on NVIDIA's mobile platform for a little more context on how far NVIDIA's
implementation has come in such a short period of time