How to BIOS update your RTX 30 series GPU to support Resizable BAR

How to BIOS update your RTX 30 series GPU to support Resizable BAR

How to BIOS update your RTX 30 series GPU to support Resizable BAR

Resizable BAR is quickly becoming a must-have feature for modern graphics hardware, allowing PC gamers to make the most out of their graphics card’s memory (VRAM) by enabling more efficient CPU-to-VRAM transfers. 

AMD first implemented Resizable BAR on its Radeon RX 6000 series graphics cards, arriving as “Smart Access Memory”, but Nvidia has quickly followed suit with their RTX 30 series of Ampere graphics cards. Now, Nvidia and their partners have launched Resizable BAR GPU BIOS updates for their RTX 30 series graphics cards, allowing more PC gamers to take advantage of this new high-end feature. 

What is Resizable BAR, and what does it do? 

Resizable BAR is an optional PCI Express feature that gives processors access to a graphics card’s full frame buffer and allows CPU-to-GPU transfers to be made more efficiently. This allows CPUs to utilise more of a graphics card’s video memory and allows transfers to be made at a faster rate by allowing them to run concurrently instead of sequentially.

This improved memory access can allow PC games to run at higher framerates, with Nvidia recording an up to 11.9% performance improvement in supported games when using an RTX 3080 graphics card on a supported system. Resizable BAR support can deliver higher framerates in existing games, and future games may utilise this feature more explicitly to deliver stronger results.

With performance gains as high as 11.9%, Nvidia couldn’t wait for future graphics cards released to enable Resizable BAR on their products, especially given AMD’s strong support for the standard.

Please note that RT 3060 graphics cards support Resizable BAR out of the box with supported motherboards. Older RTX series GPUs like Nvidia’s RTX 3060 Ti, RTX 3070, RTX 3080 and RTX 3090 all require GPU BIOS updates and Nvidia’s latest Geforce drivers to enable the feature.      

How to BIOS update your RTX 30 series GPU to support Resizable BAR  
Contents

Updating the BIOS of our Gigabyte RTX 3070 Gaming OC

How to update other RTX 30 series graphics cards

– Conclusion


Game Support

At the time of writing, Resizable BAR support is not available on all games. Nvidia’s software implementation of Resizable BAR technology is still in its infancy. Nvidia is quickly ironing out bugs to deliver game-specific support for the Resizable BAR standard, having already adding support to 17 popular PC games. 

Over time, Nvidia will add more games to this list and may be able to open up the feature to all PC games at some point in the future. As Nvidia’s drivers continue to be update, Nvidia’s Resizable BAR support will get better. 

How to BIOS update your RTX 30 series GPU to support Resizable BAR Â