AMD has certainly enjoyed the high ground for some time now
but is it over MSI doesn't think so which is why
they've sponsored today's video giving us a sneak peek at something really
exciting take a look at
this the ge76
raider big deal you might say sure it comes in a cool etched tmat edition but
at the end of the day isn't it just yet another Intel NVIDIA laptop
no no this one is different
this laptop supports resizable bar like
AMD does with their smart access memory that means that this Intel CPU
can access all of this NVIDIA GPU's
memory at once just like a ryzen and Radeon pairing can
could this be what Intel needs to fight back against AMD
i mean honestly speaking i doubt that MSI really gives a flying duck
they're playing it both ways anyway but this back and forth can only mean more
laptops flying off the shelves to consumers so
i guess that's why they're reining marketing funds into this fiery showdown
just so we're clear this is not a review we're only testing this machine today in
an on versus off configuration but we
should still get to know it a little better so that you guys know what to expect and so MSI doesn't get mad at us
it's got a 17.3 inch 300 hertz ips display that should keep our rtx 3080
max p busy despite its 1080p resolution
under the hood ours has a core i7 10878
32 gigs of ddr4 3200 megahertz RAM and a
one terabyte NVMe SSD in one of two m.2
slots it's got a beefy 5 heat pipe cooler for the CPU and GPU that MSI
calls their cooler boost 5 and feeding the beast is a 280 watt power brick and
a 99.9 watt hour battery that's let's be
honest is essential if you're gonna run this thing off the wall especially in
the extreme performance mode in dragon center in order to toggle resizable bar
on and off we're going to use an NVIDIA driver that supports it and one that
doesn't simple er
unlike these results shadow the tomb raider in traditional
rendering mode actually got slower with resizable bar enabled and was identical
when we turned on ray-traced shadows wolfenstein youngblood at least picks up
a couple of frames at minimum but nothing big and again has little to
boast about when ray tracing is enabled f1 2020 is a title that saw significant
performance uplift with smart access memory in our Radeon 6800 review but it
loses a few minimum frames with resizable bar enabled here while flight
simulator 2020 does gain a frame or two but just a frame or two
finally cs go a big winner for smart access memory on AMD sees
well a tangible increase in minimum frame rates and not much else
for fun we ran 3dmark to see if the synthetic test might show us more of a
difference but it was within half a percent either way
when we move to blender we're once again looking at minimal differences to the
point where it's tough to say that there's any real difference here at all
it's a second faster in coup to bmw but then a second slower in optics classroom
and luxmark has resizable bar losing by about two percent across the board so
does photoshop with davinci resolve and premiere coming within a single
percentage point of difference spec view perf 2020 again gives us some
brutal numbers like we're not far off but across the board it's on par or
slower than the traditional driver save for catia where it went up a single
point this all lends a fair bit of credence to AMD's claim that smart
access memory is more than simply enabling resizable bar support and
NVIDIA's confidence that they could match AMD's performance improvements
simply haven't materialized here so
does resizable bar on Intel and NVIDIA close the gap
no what yet you're probably sitting there thinking
this is kind of a weird sponsored video experience so far showing off this crazy
ball and sexy gaming monstrosity by highlighting how one of its key features
makes no difference at all but wait there's far more to this story we
reached out to MSI with our results and they said i'm paraphrasing a little bit
here well what are you some kind of an idiot this is an early tech preview it's
only validated under specific circumstances because the ladies and gents in the lab still have a lot of
work to do you dunce oh you guys
the good news is that we found one of those cases where resizable bar makes a
difference for Intel and NVIDIA today in assassin's creed valhalla
now because we only have one data point and because we don't have an rd and a2
mobile GPU yet we decided to throw together a desktop GPU bench with an rx
6800xt to inform our guesses as to what
the performance differences might look like between team red and team bluish
green in the future as it turns out team reds still got an advantage off of the
starting line compared to NVIDIA with roughly double the performance gain
across the board that's still a significant departure though from the
rest of our results today and it looks like these improvements scale
proportionally with the amount of additional power draw that we observed
this shows that not only is there a lot of room for performance to grow from
here for laptop manufacturers like MSI there's also an additional benefit being
able to increase core utilization and keep the CPU working to feed the GPU
means that you could actually maintain higher performance than you otherwise
might in a thermally constrained chassis
and would you look at that this actually bears out when we try testing the ge 76
raider in silent mode where the cooling system is limited for acoustics and the
CPU throttles clock speeds more aggressively not only do we get better frame times
with resizable bar enabled we're getting them at a smaller increase in power
consumption so in the future you might expect smaller laptops to pack a bigger punch
thanks to resizable bar and as for the big ones well they'll just get better
still like our new underwear designs at
ltdstore.com oh those are the old ones doesn't matter
the point is speaking of ltc store make sure you get subscribed because yes
i do know about the counterfeit LTT merch out there and i'm going to have a
video coming about it very soon back on topic though these performance
results leave us with some questions like what does resizable bar even do to
get these kinds of results and why did it take so long to get here resizable
bar is the official pci sig term for what AMD brands smart access memory
which allows a CPU to communicate with all of a pci express device's memory at
once instead of in smaller
meg chunks which is a big deal because that is 1 64 the size of the frame
buffer in the rtx 3080 in our ge 76 raider
while AMD only officially supports smart access memory on their 500 series
chipsets MSI has been in the news for having enabled resizable bar not only on
400 series AMD motherboards but on Intel
motherboards as old as their 300 series which means that owners of cpus as old
as 8th gen core can get in on the action too now this has been an optional part
of the pci express specification in some form since at least around 2008 but it's
never really been thought of as a desktop technology it makes sense i mean
resizable bar probably wouldn't have even made much of a difference
even a couple of years ago where on average CPU thread counts weren't as
high and gpus weren't shipping with tens
of gigabytes of memory but when AMD moved first with their smart access
memory for their Radeon 6000 series the industry took notice as the kids say
it's free real estate and AMD's platform took advantage of it
out of the gate at least for some games giving them a head start this left Intel
and NVIDIA scrambling to validate and enable a feature that they were always
able to turn on but hadn't planned to introduce yet which is where the ge76
raider came in while it might look like just another gaming laptop it's got that
RGB right it's going to be among the first with resizable bar support for its 10th gen
core i7 and rtx 3080 max p once the
official drivers land and as we've seen rtx 3080s mobile performance can be very
good so chances are it'll only get better as performance gains like we saw
today start showing up in more titles and getting embiggened
and chances are that i'm going to tell you a little more about our sponsor MSI
here in the sponsorship portion of the video the ge76 raider is their first gaming
laptop that's equipped with wi-fi 6e it uses a refined chassis with their
customizable light bar it's got up to an Intel core i9 processor and rtx 3080 max
p it features their dual wave speakers and woofer with a full hd webcam and of
course Intel plus NVIDIA resizable bar technology for smoothing out your gaming
experience you can check it out at the link below and ancient babylonian
goddesses have never looked so good does anyone know how to read like uniform
if you guys are looking for another video to watch maybe check out our
deeper look at smart access memory we're gonna have that linked down below