Alongside the launch of the Radeon RX 6700XT, AMD officially announced that it is opening up support for its Smart Access Memory (SAM) feature to its Ryzen 3000 series CPU. The feature, which was announced last year during the launch of the Radeon RX 6000 series, was initially reserved for AMD’s Ryzen 5000 series and its RDNA2-powered graphics cards.
The feature is basically AMD’s own take of the existing Resizable BAR, which has been around since the 2nd generation PCIe interface. Prior to AMD’s announcement, the feature’s use was mainly used by programmers and others within the Linux and sever communities.
Essentially, Resizable BAR enables a CPU to gain full access to a GPU’s memory and theoretically providing gamers with a slight boost in their gaming performance. In the case of SAM, the feature is designed to only work between AMD’s Radeon RX 6000 series GPUs, Ryzen 5000 series CPUs, and as of this article, its Ryzen 3000 series CPUs.
In terms of performance, AMD says that gamers that enable SAM with their Ryzen 3000 series CPUs should see a performance increase of approximately 16%. Compared to when they don’t have the feature turned on. Like the Ryzen 5000 series processors, owners of Ryzen 3000 series processors will need to update the BIOS on their motherboard before you can access those gains in framerates.
At the time of writing, AMD’s Smart Access Memory for its Ryzen 3000 series CPUs is accessible.
