Nvidia makes Resizable BAR available for the RTX 3060 and RTX 30 mobile GPUs

Nvidia has added support for Resizable BAR to its GeForce RTX 3060 desktop card and the RTX 30 laptop GPUs. Support for other desktop cards from the manufacturer will follow at the end of March.

GeForce RTX 3060 owners who wish to enable Resizable BAR must have a supported processor and motherboard and update their BIOS version to the latest version. They can then activate the feature in the GeForce Game Ready driver. For now, Nvidia only supports a few games, but the expansion to more games should follow later in March. The games that Nvidia supports are Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, Battlefield V, Borderlands 3, Forza Horizon 4, Gears 5, Metro Exodus, Red Dead Redemption 2, and Watch Dogs: Legion.

Nvidia has also listed which processors and chipsets support Resizable BAR. For the combination with Intel processors, Nvidia has worked with that company, but Nvidia also mentions the support for AMD Zen 3 processors.

Resizable BAR is a feature that has been in the PCI Express specification since 2008 that allows processors to access a much larger amount of video memory than is possible by default. This would lead to performance gains, especially in gaming.

AMD put the feature back on the map with the release of the Radeon RX 6000 under the name Smart Access Memory. That company was able to develop this independently because it manages the entire chain of processor, chipset and video card, but Intel and Nvidia have also worked on support for Resizable BAR since then. In the BIOS, the feature can be found in the PCI settings under the names Above 4G Decoding or Above 4G Memory and Resizing BAR or Resizable BAR.