Nvidia makes Resizable BAR available for all RTX 30 GPUs

Nvidia has made Resizable BAR available for all RTX 30 video cards. Users also need bios updates from video card manufacturers and a CPU and motherboard that supports the feature. Nvidia activates Resizable BAR per game.

At the end of February, Nvidia already made Resiable BAR available for the RTX 3060 and mobile RTX 30 GPUs, now the feature can also be used with the RTX 3060 Ti, RTX 3070, RTX 3080 and RTX 3090, Nvidia reports. This requires a bios update from the video card manufacturer. Nvidia has made it available for its own Founders Edition cards and various manufacturers have since released them.

According to Nvidia, the performance gains with Resizable BAR vary substantially from game to game. The maximum gain the manufacturer saw in tests is 12 percent, but in some cases performance was also sacrificed. That is why Nvidia creates specific profiles per game, where Resizable BAR can be enabled. So it is not possible to use the function for all games. According to Nvidia, this ensures that users don’t have to worry about performance loss. So far, Resizable BAR is available for 17 games.

Nvidia benchmarks with Resizable BAR

Requirements for Resizable BAR Support

Resizable BAR has been part of the PCI Express specification since 2008. The feature allows processors to access a much larger amount of video memory than is possible by default. That can lead to performance gains in games. AMD added that function to the Radeon RX 6000 under the name Smart Access Memory. After that, Intel and Nvidia teamed up to bring Resiable BAR to their platforms. In the motherboard bios, the function can be found in the PCI settings under the names Above 4G Decoding or Above 4G Memory and Resizing BAR or Resizable BAR.

To use Resizable BAR, PC owners need to have several components that support it. Nvidia has prepared tables with the requirements. The feature works with AMD 400 and 500 chipsets that support Ryzen 5000 processors, as well as on several 10th and 11th generation Intel chipsets.