Resizable BAR Tested with Intel – The Power of Boosted Memory Access

Conclusion – Resizable BAR is coming to all of the latest PC hardware

Resizable BAR support has the potential to have a transformative impact on PC gaming, giving developers more freedom by granting them free access to GPU memory for CPU/GPU related tasks. AMD was the first company to deliver this, and soon all of their competitors will too. 

Smart Access Memory is AMD’s brand name for Resizable BAR support, and while AMD was first, Intel was not far behind. It did not take long for Resizable BAR support to arrive on Z490, which allowed us to do our testing today with Intel’s i9-10850K processor. 

Right now, all major motherboard manufacturers have updated their Z490 motherboards with Resizable BAR support. Furthermore, Resizable BAR will be supported on all of Intel’s Z590 motherboards. Intel has embraced the PCIe spec’s optional Resizable BAR feature, as they know how much it could impact the performance of future games. 

Our results from Assassin’s Creed Valhalla and Forza Horizon 4 have already shown us that Resizable BAR support can deliver tremendous performance gains in existing games. Future titles have the potential to use Resizable BAR support more explicitly to deliver even larger performance benefits. AMD and Intel support this resizable BAR in their latest motherboard BIOS’. AMD supports it in their latest graphics cards, and Nvidia will be rolling out support for the feature in their future graphics cards drivers. Soon, Resizable BAR will be a feature that developers cannot ignore. 

It is worth noting that the Resizable BAR support has delivered us similar performance gains on our Ryzen 9 3950X and Intel i9-10850K, highlighting that the Resizable BAR support does not deliver any additional performance benefits when used in conjunction with PCIe 4.0. This is great news for Intel Z490 motherboard users with 10th Generation CPUs, as they will not need a PCIe 4.0 platform upgrade to access the full benefits of resizable BAR support. 

While large performance gains are possible through Resizable BAR support, this feature is not a magic bullet that will deliver you performance gains in all PC titles. Resizable BAR is designed to give your PC access to more resources, and from there it is up to your software to utilise those resources. 

Only time will tell how Resizable BAR support will change PC gaming. Having Intel and Nvidia quickly follow AMD’s lead is a good sign of things to come, though it will likely take years for developers to utilise the feature to its fullest extent. 

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