[Hardware] AMD Smart Access Memory Enabled on Intel Z490 Motherboard, Shows Noticeable Performance Gains With Radeon RX 6800 XT

[_Happy boy]

 

Several motherboard makers have started adding support for AMD's Smart Access Memory tech on Radeon RX 6800 XT & RX 6800 graphics cards to the Intel-based 400-series motherboards. ASUS and MSI are the first to allow support for SAM with ASRock and Gigabyte quickly working on getting their own support out too. Japanese outlet, ASCII, has posted the first benchmarks of how well the feature performs on the Intel platform, showing a noticeable performance improvement.

AMD Smart Access Memory Tested & Benchmarked on Intel 400-Series (Z490) Motherboard With Radeon RX 6800 XT, Shows Up To 16% Gains In Performance
AMD's Smart Access Memory technology which is a fancy name for BAR (Base Address Register)  will not require users to invest in a PCIe Gen 4 platform as it will be supported by PCIe Gen 3 too. Based on what we know so far, BAR essentially defines how much discrete GPU memory space can be mapped and today's PCs are typically limited to 256 MB of mapped memory. AMD claims that with SAM (Smart Access Memory), they can access all of the GPU memory, removing bottlenecks to allow for faster performance.AMD officially only mentioned that SAM (Smart Access Memory) would be supported by its Ryzen 5000 CPUs and the respective 500-series chipset based motherboards. However, board makers not only enabled support on AMD's 400-series motherboards but are also adding support to Intel's 400 series motherboards such as the Z490 variant tested here.

The platform used for testing included the ASUS ROG Maximus XII Extreme motherboard which was running the latest 1002 BIOS which adds support for AMD SAM (Smart Access Memory) on it. The Intel Core i9-10900K CPU was used along with the Radeon RX 6800 XT graphics card to see if the feature could be enabled and any performance gains can be seen on an Intel platform with the feature enabled. To enable the feature, you have to access the BIOS and navigate to the 'Advanced' page. The feature is set to Disabled by default but has to be set to Auto to get it to a working state.

After booting in the PC and opening the graphics card in the device manager, you can see that the GPU appears with a 'Large Memory Range' as indicated by its range address of '0000004000000000 to 00000043FFFFFFFF'.

Unfortunately, MSI has to remove the press release since it also listed down the unreleased Intel Rocket Lake CPU, presumably the Core i9-11900K. The CPU was shown running at a base clock of 3.40 GHz and a boost clock of 4.3 GHz which definitely aren't final clock speeds. Other specs such as 8 cores, 16 threads, 16 MB of L3 cache, and a TDP of 125W were also spotted.