Resizable BAR Improves Minimum Frame Rate by Stunning Amount in AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT Benchmark

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AMD’s Smart Access Memory benchmarks have alluded to some arguably negligible gains in game performance, but the technology behind it, Resizable BAR, appears to contain some interesting surprises. Japanese hardware site ASCII.jp (via VideoCardz) recently tested an ASUS ROG Maximum XII Extreme/Intel Core i9-10900K/AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT system with the feature enabled and discovered a massive, 182 percent increase in minimum frame rate performance for Red Dead Redemption 2 in 1080p.

With Smart Access Memory/Resizable BAR off, the Radeon RX 6800 XT dipped to 33.61 FPS in the cowboy epic, but when it’s enabled, the minimum frame rate jumps all the way up to 94.65. There’s also a decent improvement in average frame rate here (128.99 vs. 119.65), but it’s incomparable to what’s going on between the blue bars.

ASCII.jp also shared benchmarks of Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, Forza Horizon 4, and Rainbow Six Siege running with the Resizable BAR feature on and off. None of them echo the quirk seen in Red Dead Redemption 2, however.

“[Red Dead Redemption 2’s] benchmark tends to drop the minimum frame rate,” ASCII’s Katsuaki Kato noted. “However, in the AMD environment, it has been confirmed that the decline can be resolved by using SAM. And this time, it was confirmed that the drop in the minimum frame rate is dramatically improved even with SAM on the Intel platform.”

Tsing Mui
News poster at The FPS Review.

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