AMD’s new Radeon RX 6000 Series graphics cards will see improved performance courtesy of a feature called “Smart Access Memory,” which grants Zen 3 processors full access to GPU memory. It turns out that the competition is getting something similar.
Gamers Nexus has revealed that NVIDIA is working on its own variation of AMD’s Smart Access Memory, which will improve the performance of its GeForce RTX 30 Series GPUs. The difference is that green team’s implementation will work not only with AMD processors, but Intel chips as well.
“[…] basically, they’re working on enabling the same feature as AMD Smart Access Memory (AMD GPU+CPU=Perf uplift) on both Intel and AMD,” Gamers Nexus tweeted. “No ETA yet. Doesn’t look like it’ll be ready before RX 6000 launch, but we’ll keep an eye on development.”
Hard to fit in a tweet, but basically, they're working on enabling the same feature as AMD Smart Access Memory (AMD GPU+CPU=Perf uplift) on both Intel and AMD. No ETA yet. Doesn't look like it'll be ready before RX 6000 launch, but we'll keep an eye on development.
— GamersNexus (@GamersNexus) November 12, 2020
In its statement, NVIDIA noted that it was seeing “similar performance results,” which suggests that GeForce RTX 30 Series GPUs should see average improvements of 5 to 6 percent in popular titles.
“In conventional Windows-based PC systems, processors can only access a fraction of graphics memory (VRAM) at once, limiting system performance,” AMD explains on its Smart Access Memory landing page.
“With AMD Smart Access Memory, the data channel gets expanded to harness the full potential of GPU memory, utilizing the bandwidth of PCI Express to remove the bottlenecks and increase performance.”
AMD’s Smart Access Memory feature requires a Ryzen 5000 Series processor and 500 Series motherboard.
