Nvidia Intros Resizable BAR Support with RTX 3060 Cards and 30 Series Laptops

Image of an Nvidia GeForce RTX graphics card.
(Image credit: Shutterstock)

Nvidia today announced that Resizable Base Address Register (BAR) support is now available for RTX 3060 graphics cards and RTX 30 Series laptops. That’s earlier than the company anticipated, but it comes with a caveat, because its other desktop GPUs aren’t expected to receive drivers that support the technology until “late March.”

AMD was first to market with Resizable BAR support, which it branded as Smart Access Memory, but the technology is actually part of the PCIe spec. The feature expanded to the Intel Z490 platform in December 2020, and Intel told us earlier this month that it was ready to support Nvidia graphics cards as soon as possible.

So what is Resizable BAR? Nvidia explained in today’s announcement that it’s meant to let the CPU  “efficiently access the entire frame buffer” by enabling as-needed transfers of textures, shaders, and geometry that can be processed concurrently rather than queued up. The result: improved performance. Maybe. In a few titles.

Intel’s GM of premium and gaming notebook segments, Fredrik Hamberger, told us that Resizable BAR support could lead to performance gains of 5-10% in some games. Nvidia said that “the performance benefits of Resizable BAR can vary substantially from game to game,” however, and that some titles actually performed worse. Support is also available for AMD CPUs.

Chart of CPUs that work with resizable BAR

(Image credit: Nvidia)

This led the company to say that it “will be pre-testing titles and using game profiles to enable Resizable BAR only in games where it has a positive performance impact.” That’s resulted in RTX cards supporting just eight titles, including Assassin’s Creed Valhalla and Red Dead Redemption 2, with the initial driver that was released today.

Nvidia said it plans to expand Resizable BAR support to additional games when it rolls the feature out to more of its 30-series graphics cards next month. For now, though, it seems like the company’s support for the technology will only affect a very small portion of its customers. Let’s see if it raises the (resizable) bar later on. 

Nathaniel Mott
Freelance News & Features Writer

Nathaniel Mott is a freelance news and features writer for Tom's Hardware US, covering breaking news, security, and the silliest aspects of the tech industry.

  • spongiemaster
    404 error for the article link here.

    Here are the 8 games supported for both people that got a 3060.

    Assassin's Creed ValhallaBattlefield VBorderlands 3Forza Horizon 4Gears 5Metro ExodusRed Dead Redemption 2Watch Dogs: Legion
    Link to the Nvidia announcement in the actual article doesn't work either. Nice job THG. Working one below.

    https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/news/geforce-rtx-30-series-resizable-bar-support/
    Reply
  • emike09
    Now if only there was increased Intel motherboard support, in particular, for X299 since there still isn't an updated chipset for Intel's HEDT range. Come on Asus, make our day!
    Reply
  • cryoburner
    This led the company to say that it “will be pre-testing titles and using game profiles to enable Resizable BAR only in games where it has a positive performance impact.” That’s resulted in RTX cards supporting just eight titles, including Assassin’s Creed Valhalla and Red Dead Redemption 2, with the initial driver that was released today.
    That's a good idea that should ensure there not being any performance regressions, though a blacklist with the feature enabled by default might be better. Or the option to choose between the two. Judging by existing Smart Access Memory benchmarks for AMD's cards, there are a number of other games that can see notable performance improvements from enabling the feature, and those that see performance regressions tend to be much less common. It's possible that the effect on Nvidia's Ampere architecture might be different though, and perhaps regressions would be more common, or more severe.
    Reply
  • emike09
    emike09 said:
    Now if only there was increased Intel motherboard support, in particular, for X299 since there still isn't an updated chipset for Intel's HEDT range. Come on Asus, make our day!
    Thanks Asus for implementing support on X299! Wasn't expected, but greatly appreciated.
    Reply