AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX and XT Smart Access Memory Performance

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AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX on the left and AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT on the right with AMD Ryzen Smart Access Memory Logo

Introduction

This review is going to cut straight to the chase, we are going to find out how performance is affected on the new AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX and Radeon RX 7900 XT video cards with AMD Smart Access Memory On versus Off.  AMD Smart Access Memory is related to the PCI-Express Resizable BAR (Base Address Register), or ReBar for short, built into modern motherboards.  AMD has its own sauce for utilizing Resizable BAR that it calls AMD Smart Access Memory.

Reviews across the web have been inconsistent, could it be because AMD Smart Access Memory is not being used? Are reviewers using Intel systems hurting Radeon Radeon RX 7900 Series GPU performance? Could this really help the Radeon RX 7900 XTX and Radeon RX 7900 XT perform better and compete better with the competition? Is AMD SAM the saving grace for the Radeon RX 7900 Series GPUs? Note that our launch reviews had it enabled, so let’s turn it off and see how it compares.

What is AMD Smart Access Memory?

When combined with an AMD Ryzen CPU and chipset, and AMD GPU and driver you can benefit from AMD Smart Access Memory on your Radeon GPU to improve gaming performance for free.  It’s a system platform optimization that gamers can freely utilize for free performance uplifts with this synergy of components.

What we want to find out is how much difference it really makes with the new Radeon RX 7900 Series GPUs RDNA3 architecture.  Therefore, we are going to take the Radeon RX 7900 XTX and Radeon RX 7900 XT and compare performance with Resizable BAR enabled and disabled in the BIOS, no other changes.  We are running on an AMD AM5 platform Ryzen 9 7900X CPU and X670E chipset for that complete AMD Smart Access Memory (AMD SAM) platform synergy.

How to enable Smart Access Memory

AMD Smart Access Memory Driver Screenshot

Test Setup

System Setup Table

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Brent Justicehttps://www.thefpsreview.com
Former managing editor of GPUs at HardOCP for 18 years, Brent Justice has been reviewing computer components since the late 90s, educated in the art and method of the computer hardware review, he brings experience, knowledge, and hands-on testing with a gamer-oriented and hardware enthusiast perspective. You can follow him on Twitter - @Brent_Justice You can sub to his YouTube channel - Justice Gaming https://www.youtube.com/c/JusticeGamingChannel You can check out his computer builds on KIT - @BrentJustice https://kit.co/BrentJustice

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