AMD’s Smart Access Memory technology is officially no longer exclusive to Ryzen 5000 Series processors. Radeon CVP & GM Scott Herkelman confirmed the news during today’s Radeon RX 6700 event, noting that the performance boosting feature would soon be enabled for AMD’s older, Zen 2-based Ryzen 3000 Series processors. Red team has noted that the the Ryzen 5 3400G and Ryzen 3 3200G are excluded from Smart Access Memory support, however.
“A lot of you have been asking us about support on previous generation CPUs with AMD Smart Access Memory,” Herkelman said. “So today, we are announcing that in addition to the Ryzen 5000 Series processors, we will be enabling Ryzen 3000 Series processors to deliver the same great performance improvements with AMD’s Smart Access Memory technology when paired with an AMD Radeon RX 6000 Series graphics card.”
“In conventional Windows-based PC systems, processors can only access a fraction of graphics memory (VRAM) at once, limiting system performance,” AMD explained. “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 updated marketing materials suggest that Smart Access Memory can boost performance by as much as 16 percent in select titles. Two of the biggest winners appear to be Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation and Forza Horizon 4, which purportedly enjoy performance gains of up to 13 percent and 12 percent when Smart Access Memory is enabled, respectively. An AMD 500 Series motherboard is also listed under the official requirements.
