are you in the market for a new graphics card if so you've probably seen plenty
of performance reviews that primarily focus on the GPU itself but the video
memory of a graphics card can often be a bottleneck and i'm not just talking
about how much vram you have or how fast it is but the way that the rest of your
system talks to it this is an issue that AMD has tried to resolve with a new
feature called smart access memory and to find out more about it we spoke with
nish nilogen i'm so sorry the product manager for
AMD's new Radeon rx6000 series gpus and
we'd like to thank him for taking the time out of his busy schedule to assist us with this video so the particular
bottleneck AMD was hoping to address was the data link between the graphics
card's video memory and the system's CPU
the CPU needs to communicate regularly with the vram in order to ensure that
the vram has the correct data for the GPU to act upon historically the CPU
could only access 256 megabytes of vram
at once this limit was actually set a long time ago back when cards with one
Gigabyte or less of vram were far more common but these days the 256 meg limit
which has been kept in place in order to ensure compatibility with older 32-bit
cpus is a real bottleneck that can result in tangible performance loss
because of the space constraint created by this limit data can get shunted over
to your main system memory instead which slows things down smart access memory
addresses this by taking advantage of a new feature that's actually in the PCIe
or pci express standard called resizable bar
this allows your CPU to access much more vram at once multiple gigabytes in fact
depending on how much vram you have on your card AMD has built on the resizable
bar feature with compatibility testing and driver optimizations that attempt to
place resources the CPU needs to access frequently such as render commands onto
the vram instead of system memory unsurprisingly however the exact
performance benefits will depend a lot on your workload and which game you're
playing although AMD has tried to make their driver optimizations effective
across a range of titles developers also need to make use of the resizable bar
feature AMD is claiming that smart access memory boosts
performance by an average of six percent in terms of frame rate but what do you
need to take advantage of it and get that six percent well at the time we
shot this video the feature only works if you have a ryzen 5000 CPU a Radeon rx
6000 GPU and a 500 series AMD chipset
the holy trinity but hold on a second it's based on resizable bar which is
part of an open standard why do you need such a specific hardware combo well
there is not some kind of inherent technical limitation that you can only
get around if you have those specific parts AMD's approach is partly to
promote their newest products but they also want to do more validation and
testing before smart access memory is enabled on older equipment which AMD
does plan on doing in a phased rollout team red is also working with believe it
or not Intel and NVIDIA to enable similar technologies on those platforms
ultimately AMD's vision is to have smart access memory be similar to freesync
AMD's specific implementation would still be called smart access memory but
the underlying tech could be used by other companies this is especially good
news if you want a CPU or a GPU that isn't from AMD and NVIDIA has already
confirmed a similar feature for their own gpus is in the works but if and when
you do get a system that supports smart access memory be sure to confirm that
resizable bar support is turned on in your BIOS for now it's actually off by
default to try to prevent errors with hardware or software that doesn't
support it fully so it seems like AMD's philosophy for now is better safe than
sorry which anyone who's ever fried a CPU
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