FEBRUARY 2021 PCWorld 33the feature, and presumably AMD’s new Ryzen
5000 Mobile chips (see page 15) will as well,
since the company’s desktop Ryzen 5000 series
(go.pcworld.com/dr50) introduced the
technology. AMD hasn’t confirmed that, but
Nvidia says (go.pcworld.com/nv30) the laptop
GPUs work with AMD laptops as well as Intel’s.
On the desktop, you’ll need a relatively
new processor and motherboard to activate
Resizable BAR even if your graphics card
supports it. AMD rolled out Smart Access
Memory with its new Ryzen 5000 desktop
processors (go.pcworld.com/dr50) and
X570 motherboards. Hopefully the
technology will make its way to Intel’s new
11th-gen Core “Rocket Lake” CPUs (see page
22) launching later this quarter, especially
considering it’s included in Tiger Lake. We’ve
already seen some motherboard makers
enable the feature on select Z490 boards, so
hopefully it will come unlocked on Rocket
Lake’s Z590 offerings.
Resizable BAR doesn’t offer a substantial
performance boost in most cases, but it’s
fantastic to see it rapidly becoming a universal
feature. Every frame counts.Resizable BAR lets the CPU tap fully into the GPU’s memory, offering performance gains in some
scenarios.