WEBVTT

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are you in the market for a new graphics card if so you've probably seen plenty

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of performance reviews that primarily focus on the GPU itself but the video

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memory of a graphics card can often be a bottleneck and i'm not just talking

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about how much vram you have or how fast it is but the way that the rest of your

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system talks to it this is an issue that AMD has tried to resolve with a new

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feature called smart access memory and to find out more about it we spoke with

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nish nilogen i'm so sorry the product manager for

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AMD's new Radeon rx6000 series gpus and

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we'd like to thank him for taking the time out of his busy schedule to assist us with this video so the particular

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bottleneck AMD was hoping to address was the data link between the graphics

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card's video memory and the system's CPU

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the CPU needs to communicate regularly with the vram in order to ensure that

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the vram has the correct data for the GPU to act upon historically the CPU

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could only access 256 megabytes of vram

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at once this limit was actually set a long time ago back when cards with one

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Gigabyte or less of vram were far more common but these days the 256 meg limit

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which has been kept in place in order to ensure compatibility with older 32-bit

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cpus is a real bottleneck that can result in tangible performance loss

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because of the space constraint created by this limit data can get shunted over

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to your main system memory instead which slows things down smart access memory

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addresses this by taking advantage of a new feature that's actually in the PCIe

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or pci express standard called resizable bar

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this allows your CPU to access much more vram at once multiple gigabytes in fact

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depending on how much vram you have on your card AMD has built on the resizable

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bar feature with compatibility testing and driver optimizations that attempt to

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place resources the CPU needs to access frequently such as render commands onto

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the vram instead of system memory unsurprisingly however the exact

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performance benefits will depend a lot on your workload and which game you're

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playing although AMD has tried to make their driver optimizations effective

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across a range of titles developers also need to make use of the resizable bar

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feature AMD is claiming that smart access memory boosts

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performance by an average of six percent in terms of frame rate but what do you

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need to take advantage of it and get that six percent well at the time we

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shot this video the feature only works if you have a ryzen 5000 CPU a Radeon rx

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6000 GPU and a 500 series AMD chipset

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the holy trinity but hold on a second it's based on resizable bar which is

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part of an open standard why do you need such a specific hardware combo well

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there is not some kind of inherent technical limitation that you can only

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get around if you have those specific parts AMD's approach is partly to

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promote their newest products but they also want to do more validation and

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testing before smart access memory is enabled on older equipment which AMD

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does plan on doing in a phased rollout team red is also working with believe it

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or not Intel and NVIDIA to enable similar technologies on those platforms

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ultimately AMD's vision is to have smart access memory be similar to freesync

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AMD's specific implementation would still be called smart access memory but

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the underlying tech could be used by other companies this is especially good

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news if you want a CPU or a GPU that isn't from AMD and NVIDIA has already

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confirmed a similar feature for their own gpus is in the works but if and when

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you do get a system that supports smart access memory be sure to confirm that

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resizable bar support is turned on in your BIOS for now it's actually off by

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default to try to prevent errors with hardware or software that doesn't

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support it fully so it seems like AMD's philosophy for now is better safe than

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sorry which anyone who's ever fried a CPU

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watching guys if you like this video like it subscribe it

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and be sure to hit us up in the comments section with your suggestions for topics

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that we should cover in the future