Tuesday, January 12th 2021

NVIDIA Details its Resizable-BAR Feature Rollout, Eligible Products
NVIDIA on Tuesday announced a roll-out of its implementation of the PCI-SIG resizable base-address register (BAR) feature to select GeForce products. The feature enables your CPU to see the entire video memory of your graphics card as one addressable block, rather than through 256 MB apertures. This should improve certain kinds of 3D rendering workloads, and game engines that are optimized to use it should see a tangible performance boost. AMD earlier introduced the exact same feature under its marketing name "Smart Access Memory," with its Radeon RX 6000 series.
NVIDIA announced that resizable-BAR support will be made available to GeForce RTX 30-series "Ampere" desktop graphics cards, notebooks that have RTX 30-series "Ampere" mobile GPUs, and future products. The support requires not just a compatible graphics card, but also a motherboard that supports the feature. Most leading motherboard- and OEM desktop manufacturers began rolling out resizable-BAR support through UEFI firmware updates. Using the feature requires you to run your machine in native UEFI mode (with CSM disabled).
NVIDIA announced that resizable-BAR support will be made available to GeForce RTX 30-series "Ampere" desktop graphics cards, notebooks that have RTX 30-series "Ampere" mobile GPUs, and future products. The support requires not just a compatible graphics card, but also a motherboard that supports the feature. Most leading motherboard- and OEM desktop manufacturers began rolling out resizable-BAR support through UEFI firmware updates. Using the feature requires you to run your machine in native UEFI mode (with CSM disabled).
52 Comments on NVIDIA Details its Resizable-BAR Feature Rollout, Eligible Products
I'm going to enjoy it on a 3900X without paying AMD the ridiculous price they are asking for a Zen 3 CPU (and without using a poor RT performance RX 6800 card).
It was never limited to just that hardware, that was just the starting point.
As someone with 64GB system ram and a 24GB GPU, i'm hoping its on the 'more' side
If we are moving towards streaming Textures straight from SSD to VRAM, having faster access to the VRAM should definitely help. Not sure if the streaming in game engines has to pass through CPU tho, but that would explain why we are seeing massive leaps in performance when tested on AC: Valhalla with Resize-BAR enabled for example.
There were also "rumors" pointed at hardware lack of support for Zen 2, at the beginning... it was just marketing.
Although of course, BIOS updates for GPUs are not really a common thing to do. A lot of things could go wrong for what is, at the moment at least, not much gain to be had.
What I don't get is that apparently Linux has had this feature for a while now. Does that mean that on linux resize-BAR works without any BIOS updates or was it just there as in, available in the kernel?
Cyberpunk has a memory leak issue where performance gets gradually worse, but the more VRAM you have or the lower your settings are, the more time it takes for it to take effect. It will happen on any 8 and 6 GB card though, at some time. That is why many people experienced better performance after restarting the game (which lead to that memorypool.ini placebo)
For Cyberpunk: Yeah, I am aware that there is a "memory leak", as it almost halves my framerate after some time. However, it is also much less likely to occur if I lower texture resolution to Medium. Indeed, I think what that "memory leak" really is, is the RED Engine using system memory as "extended" video memory to prevent crashing. Unfortunately this means that the game sometimes needs to fetch data from that slow pool of memory, which slows performance considerably! There is definitely points in the game, where the engine genuinely runs out of memory if I max out settings with Textures on High. It's easiest to reproduce when you go to the market close to where the fixer "Regina" is holed up. It generally starts hitching while running through that market and it becomes really obvious, when you switch to photomode. In that case I have my VRAM utilization pegged at 6144 (or thereabout) and besides the constant hitching you'll have NPCs disappearing and reappearing or actually parts of your own charmodel (clothes/hair etc.) disappearing and reappearing.
So yeah, VRAM limitations are a real thing, especially if you use RTX which needs a good chunk of extra memory.
Also, the GTX 970 has 3.5GB VRAM and may be your problem, even at 768p
Would it not be the GPU manufacturer to do the BIOS update?
Some would do it, maybe others would not.
Same goes for motherboards. Intel platforms since Haswell can do it.
nVIDIA is, once again, trying to sell product by making older products less attractive. And, who can actually find a 3080 or 3090? Installing eVGA Precision X1 with a eVGA RTX GPU will automatically check and offer to update the firmware. Have not read that anyone has had a bricked GPU because of it.
then the manufs would have to do it
And they would simply not do it for discontinued products - look at all the fluff for backdating ryzen CPU support, the companies basically said to get F'd unless they were still selling them (such as B450 being supported when x370 was not)