Asus is now offering a public beta BIOS version, which supports the resizable BAR feature on intel H460, H470, and H490 motherboards. The BIOS versions support AMD’s SAM for the old B450 and X470 models is still not allowed to private testers.
AMD’s Smart Access Memory is a feature that can take advantage of the new RX 6000 GPUs when it is connected with the Ryzen 5000 desktop CPUs. For more than four years, this technology is being hidden within the PCIe 3.x specifications. This means that Nvidia and Intel can take advantage of it. But the Nvidia RTX 3000 users still have to wait until early 2021.
KOMACHI_ENSAKA wrote on Twitter that Asus had revealed a new Z490 BIOS (version 1002) which supports the feature of Resizable BAR. This same information was reported by Tom’s Hardware. Chris Wafers, representative of German Asus informed in a recent tweet that the BIOS is now ready for H470 and B460 motherboards. But this is now a beta release which may contain bugs. So, if you want to try it, you have to take the risk on your own.
Chris Wafers added a slide with the expected performance increase where the Resizable BAR feature comes to the Intel mobo owners. In the initial tests, we have seen that on some games, AMD’s SAM have little to no impact. But there is a game like Forza Horizon 4, which can benefit from it.
Asus used the game to showcase the performance increase on a particular configuration which includes the ROG Maximus XII Hero (WiFi) mobo running an Intel Core i7-10700K connected with an RX 6800T card. The exact graphics was not mentioned in the test, but a 13% performance increase is seen, which translates to ~20fps. Let’s see if Nvidia’s implementation can outperform AMD or not.
