PCIe Resizable BAR Performance AMD and NVIDIA benchmarks - Concluding

Concluding

Yep, that was close to 500 individual test runs, time to wrap things up. We're not 100% what to make of SAM / ReSize BAR just yet. Yes, it has the potential to boost performance a bit, but the plots show that more visually than you would ever notice on the screen. However, the results show that overall in a bigger picture the FPS differences are more eminent, but often can even fall within normal error margins.

rBAR is a feature that has been left untouched for years, and as to why it now all of the sudden is so trendy, is a bit of an enigma. Perhaps there have been good reasons to leave it disabled/limited for a decade? Overall, the perf can be a few percent higher and with a game or two exceptionally good (Assassins Creed Valhalla is such a title). For the rest, it's all positive, yet average. So you'll need to weigh for yourself if all that configuration and updating is worth it or not.

For NVIDIA there's a lot of work to be done now and in the future, their game-compatible support whitelist is just too small to make a big enough difference with all games available. Then again, with a whitelist comes a blacklist, certain games could show negative performance scaling or stability issues, here this approach makes a lot of sense. AMD, on the other hand, opted for a more brute force approach and enabled it for all games. Aside from the typical anomalies, it does seem and feel well implemented. The one title that went apeshit on us was Far Cry New Dawn, at lower resolutions performance caved in tremendously on Radeon cards, but that actually had nothing to do with rBAR, but rather the game engine running into the weirdest bottlenecks at times on this specific platform.

Should you enable rBAR? Yes, undoubtedly. But only if you have a compatible setup with everything preset as we described this would get recommended. Honestly, if you're not compatible then the sBIOS updates, vBIOS updates, and making sure about storage compatibility, could be just a bit too much to be brutally honest. Basically, if your setup already had CSM enabled mode, don't. And if you had it enabled all this time, go for it and give it a try. The fact is that there the vast majority of the games will hardly show a difference with exceptions here and there. But hey, extra free performance here and there on a supported game, ... is always welcomed. 

We now have retested all games on the AMD test setup, so we'll move forward with our future benchmarks tested at Resizable BAR / rBAR/ SAM activated.

• Download the latest NVIDIA GeForce graphics game ready driver (download).
• Download the latest AMD Radeon graphics Adrenalin driver (download). 
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