AMD Smart Access Memory now available on Ryzen 3000 series desktop processors!

AMD has just officially announced support for AMD Smart Access Memory on the AMD Ryzen 3000 series desktop processors and AMD 500 series motherboards. While previously exclusive to the AMD Ryzen 5000 series desktop processors, now Zen 2 users can also enjoy the performance uplift enabled by allowing the CPU to address the full VRAM on the latest Radeon RX 6000 series cards.

By announced AMD Smart Access Memory, AMD single-handedly kickstarted the industry-wide support for Resizable BAR. While the feature wasn’t exactly new as it was part of the PCIe spec, it wasn’t adopted by any vendor in Windows until AMD branded it as AMD Smart Access Memory and unveiled it as part of the Radeon RX 6000 series’ feature set.

Previously, we reported that AMD left out the necessary instructions to support Resizable BAR on AMD Ryzen 3000 series processors, which was a bummer to anyone planning to upgrade their last-gen AMD builds with the new Radeon RX 6000 graphics cards. Apparently that wasn’t true as we have this tidbit today, which was announced along with the new Radeon RX 6700 XT graphics card.

AMD promises up to 16% improvements with AMD Smart Access Memory enabled, but we have seen all the way up to 26% higher frame rates with Resizable BAR turned on in games like Borderlands 3 with our Intel Core i9-10900K bench rig when testing the AMD Radeon RX 6800. The gains are not universal though, as some games actually see negative scaling when the feature is enabled.

Pokdepinion: I don’t think I will say no to free performance. I mean, who will?