Nvidia has yet to deliver on that promise although it's only been a few weeks since. ![]() Nvidia has also come out to say they will be enabling SAM on GeForce GPUs via a driver update, while stating that they've got it working on both AMD and Intel platforms. That makes the feature less appealing and restrictive, even though with some extra work in theory this could be offered on all current AMD and Intel platforms. It's worth noting that as of writing, AMD's only offering SAM support with the new RDNA2 GPUs when paired with a Ryzen 5000 processors on a 500 series motherboard. Notwithstanding, AMD took a different approach with RDNA2 by using a 256-bit wide memory bus in conjunction with their Infinity Cache, and they felt it was time to take advantage of this feature and squeeze some extra performance that would let them be more competitive against Nvidia's Ampere. However, for the most part there's been no need to make any changes to this limit either, as high-end GPUs typically feature wide memory buses and therefore have significantly more memory bandwidth at their disposal when compared to system memory. There's no real reason why the 256 MB limit exists, it was put in place back in the 32-bit era and hasn't been altered since. Typically the CPU can access up to 256 MB of mapped VRAM, but with the resizable BAR it can have full access to the graphics cards' VRAM buffer. ![]() ![]() While technically SAM is not an AMD-exclusive technology, they are the first to take advantage of the resizable Base Address Register or resizable BAR, a feature introduced with the PCIe 3.0 spec.įor those of you not yet up to speed, SAM or resizable BAR defines how much of your graphics cards VRAM is to be mapped for access by the CPU. All in all, we plan to benchmark 36 games at 1080p, 1440p and 4K. Today we're taking a detailed look at how AMD's Smart Access Memory (SAM) technology influences performance in a wide range of games.
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