Resizeable BAR support for ASUS 400-series motherboards
AMD Smart Access Memory support arrives to Intel-based motherboards from ASUS. The SAM technology existed for years in the official PCIe specifications, but only after AMD found a way to increase performance for its ‘Ultimate Gaming Platform’ aka Ryzen 5000 & Radeon 6000 systems, the technology suddenly became a focus of NVIDIA and Intel motherboard makers.
According to Tom’s Hardware, ASUS recently released a new firmware for various Z490 motherboards that enabled resizeable BAR (Base Address Register) support. The evidence has been found in the BIOS settings which list ‘Above 4G Decoding’ and ‘Re-Size BAR Support’ for the Maximus XII APEX motherboard based on Intel Z490 chipset.
This information has been confirmed by an ASUS representative who says that Beta BIOS is already available for ASUS Z490, H470 and B460 motherboard owners. The support rolls out ahead of official support from NVIDIA for their latest Ampere GeForce RTX 30 graphics cards. Meanwhile, AMD Radeon RX 6000 series GPUs should already able to take the advantage of the new feature:
ROG Maximus XII Apex – 1002 Firmware, Source: Tom’s Hardware
According to the slide shared by ASUS, 13.37% performance uplift in Forza Horizon 4 on Core i7-10700K and Radeon RX 6800XT platform is to be expected:
ASUS Smart Access Memory on Intel Platform
Source: Tom’s Hardware via TechPowerUP, @chris_wefers
