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Highly anticipated: Nvidia has finally started rolling out support for resizable bars, starting with the desktop RTX 3060 and a few laptops with the RTX 3000 series. Enabling it can be a bit of a hassle, but it’s an upgrade. free, so it’s nice.
Resizable BAR is a feature of the PCIe standard that allows a system’s processor to see the entire GPU memory subsystem, instead of a small 256MB portion. Implementing the feature requires low-level support in the processor, motherboard and GPU, so AMD, which designs all three, was the first to release a Resizable BAR implementation called SAM (Intelligent Access Memory) .
In our testing, enabling SAM on an RX 6800 could improve the average frame rate of a game by up to 20%, or harm it by up to 10%. In most titles, however, activating the feature did next to nothing, resulting in an average improvement – just 3%.
Naturally, then, Nvidia takes a different path. Their drivers will leave the resizable bar turned off by default and only turn it on in titles where Nvidia has found to improve performance. At the time of writing, that’s eight titles:
- Assassin’s Creed Valhalla
- Battlefield v
- Borderlands 3
- Forza Horizon 4
- Gears 5
- Metro Exodus
- Red Dead Redemption 2
- Watch Dogs: Legion
In these games, says Nvidia, Resizable BAR can improve performance “by a few percent to 10 percent.” By the end of March, when the rest of the RTX 3000 series receives Resizable BAR support, more games will be added to the roster. Nvidia’s selective approach is undoubtedly a good idea (if done right), but unfortunately it’s a benefit that is negated by the complexity of activating the resizable bar.
In laptops, the situation is okay but not great: some laptops will come with the resizable bar turned on, some won’t, and there’s nothing you can do about it. Nvidia says to “check with each laptop manufacturer to see if Resizable BAR is supported on a particular model.”
Desktop compatibility is a 3D chess game. Enabling Resizable BAR, or, just as likely, finding that your system doesn’t support it, is a five-step process. First, you will need to check if your processor is compatible: all AMD 5000 series processors are compatible, like all 10th gen Intel processors, but only the upcoming 11th gen i5, i7 and i9 series will be. compatible. . Quite simple…
Step two: check your motherboard chipset. AMD 500 series chipsets are compatible (if not desirable, for now) and 400 series chipsets are compatible on motherboards that are also compatible with Ryzen 5000 series processors. Series 500 announced by Intel at the time of writing are all compatible, as are all of their 400 series chipsets. Still with me?
The third step is more inconvenient: you will have to update your motherboard’s SBIOS, but you will just have to hope that an update exists. According to Nvidia, “The following manufacturers are offering SBIOS updates for certain motherboards to enable Resizable BAR with GeForce RTX 30 desktop graphics cards: Asus, Asrock, Colorful, EVGA, Gigabyte, and MSI.”
Fourth, you’ll need to update your GPU’s VBIOS, unless you’re one of the lucky few with a new RTX 3060. For Founder’s Edition owners, Nvidia will provide the update themselves, but everything everyone will need to download the update from their GPU Manufacturer Page.
And the last step: update your GPU drivers. Then you can check if the resizable BAR is working correctly in the Nvidia control panel, in the System Information tab.
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