Conclusion

Our launch-day coverage of the Radeon RX 6800 series includes: Radeon RX 6800 XT review, Radeon RX 6800 review, and AMD Smart Access Memory review.

By now, if you've read our full Radeon RX 6800 XT review, you'll know that AMD has gained solid ground in performance, and the days of intense Radeon vs. GeForce competition are back. The RX 6800 XT averages just 2% behind the RTX 3080 at 1080p, just 1% behind at 1440p, but 6% behind at 4K—as tested on a machine powered by a Ryzen 9 5900X; these gaps are different in our main review, which is using an Intel processor.

Enabling Smart Access Memory (SAM) is done by toggling a switch in the UEFI setup program of a compatible motherboard—if you've satisfied the requirement of a Ryzen 5000 series processor and AMD 500-series chipset motherboard. With SAM enabled, we see the averages change "dramatically" (in the context of competition), with the RX 6800 XT now being 2% faster across all three resolutions. This helps the RX 6800 XT match the RTX 3080 at 1080p, while beating it by 1% at 1440p and being just 4% slower at 4K UHD—imagine these gains without even touching other features, such as Radeon Boost or Rage Mode!

It's important to understand that SAM doesn't work with all game engines, however. In Borderlands 3 and Divinity, for example, SAM negatively impacts performance. It seems SAM comes with a small CPU overhead, which will cause a loss in FPS in games that are CPU bound because the CPU is losing time in dealing with SAM, time it can't use to handle frame rendering. In certain other games, there's zero impact (e.g., DOOM Eternal). In certain games, though, such as "Gears 5," there are significant frame-rate gains seen with SAM enabled, which help tilt the averages in favor of SAM being enabled.

Overall, SAM isn't snake oil per se, it offers tangible performance gains that are surprisingly large considering nobody cared about the resizable BAR feature for years. We only wish AMD hadn't restricted it to only its latest platform, and the latest processor. If AMD's excuse is "we want to maximize PCIe Gen 4 bandwidth utilization, Gen 3 would post bottlenecks," our retort would be "what about Ryzen 3000 Matisse?" What about Intel's "Rocket Lake" which comes out next year? The restriction to Ryzen 5000 seems arbitrary.

NVIDIA has already announced that they will add a similar feature to their GeForce graphics cards, probably with wider platform support. I'm sure this will ultimately have AMD open their discovery to more chipsets and hardware combinations. Enabling the feature requires you to boot in UEFI mode. If you've been denying UEFI like I have and rather use CSM and MBR, then the time to switch has come, the performance gains finally justify it.

If you're one of the lucky few who flew to the horn of Africa, joined a pirate gang, hijacked a Maersk superheavy, broke into the right container, and pulled out a Ryzen 5000 processor, then Smart Access Memory is a cool feature to have (no, don't do that).