(upbeat music) – Sometimes you don't
realize what you're missing until it's staring you in the face. But when you notice it, it's just … So sweet, isn't it? Well, that's what we finally
have here today with Nvidia, the opportunity to have
our cake and eat it too, because they have finally
enabled resizable bar on their desktop GeForce GPUs. Get it? Resizable bar, extra sweetness? (laughs) In theory, this is a simple driver update that will unlock extra performance on your existing GPU. Assuming you're lucky enough to own one. But what we're gonna find out is if it is truly something for nothing, or if it's just an illusion. (upbeat music) I'll give you the segue to our sponsor for nothing though, Smart Deploy can help you
manage every Windows endpoint in your environment from one
centralized golden image. Grab your exclusive free
software worth over $800 at smartdeploy.com/linus (upbeat music) Resizable bar has been a big deal ever since AMD announced
their implementation of the feature called smart access memory.
If you haven't been keeping
up with all the buzz, it basically allows a CPU to access all of a PCI Express
device's memory at once, rather than in small, 256 megabyte chunks, as has been the case until now. Resizable bar has existed
in the data center for some time now, but it couldn't find
momentum on the desktop until AMD kicked off this scramble to implement it industry wide. Which kind of raises the question. Why now? Well, in the early days of PCI Express, it wasn't a problem for gamers, because game assets, like textures, were sized proportionally
to the video frame buffers of that time. But with the complexity of today's games, and with modern graphics cards having as much as 24
gigabytes of onboard memory, you can easily imagine a situation where the CPU could waste a lot of cycles, getting the data it needs, if it can only address
256 megabytes at a time, ultimately eliminating this waste is where our performance boost comes from. The only problem is that
in order to support it, every device in the chain
needs to be capable. The CPU, the motherboard,
and the PCI Express device, which, in this case is a GPU.
Now we've already looked at Nvidia's preliminary implementation
of resizable bar on mobile GeForce GPUs, with
an MSI GE76 Raider laptop. And at the time we
concluded that there was more to the sometimes impressive
performance improvements that AMD was getting, than just enabling resizable bar. And we also concluded that Nvidia had some work to do before
it was ready for prime time.
But even with it fully cooked, it's important to know that not every game or application will benefit, and how the driver
handles memory management appears to play a major role in what kind of performance uplift, or fall you can expect. That's where Nvidia's latest drivers, and the free chocolate come in. Our previous investigation showed that the impact differs
depending on CPU performance. So we grabbed both, a Ryzen 5 5600X and a Ryzen 9 5900X to represent the mid-range
and the high end. We'll be using a GeForce RTX 3080, and for comparison against team red, we've got a Radeon RX 6800 XT. Something to note is that
because we're focused on their respective improvements, over stock performance, and not on completely
re-reviewing these cards, all of the results for both sides will be in relative percentages.
At 1080p, things are
already really interesting. Shadow of the Tomb Raider
doesn't change much, but where Radeon loses some performance in the 5% lows on Ryzen 9, GeForce gains hinting that Nvidia might be doing a better job of reducing die to die latency, on AMD's own CPU, than
AMD's graphics team is. GTA V on the other hand, gives GeForce a hard time, with Radeon gaining a bit with Ryzen 5, which further hints that
AMD's implementation favors single die CPU's. As for F1 2020, this is one of Nvidia's
call-outs for performance uplift and it brings the first major
victory for resizable bar. We ended up with slightly
higher average frame times across the board for
team green, which is bad, but significantly lower,
1% minimum frame times that reach toward a 10%
improvement on the 5,900 X. That's good because in almost any game improving performance
during challenging scenes is way more important than that when animations
are already smooth. This is especially true
in competitive titles when performance tends to fall in the heat of battle because of all the
character models and effects that are on screen.
Again, Nvidia seems to be
taking better advantage of the extra course on the Ryzen 9. Forza Horizon 4 is another call-out and another win for Nvidia. Although the pattern flips here, with the Ryzen 5 pulling
better improvements across the board than the Ryzen 9. This suggests that memory access patterns play a significant role in whether the die
arrangement causes issues. Radeon on the other hand struggles, especially with the Ryzen 9, where minimum frame rates
are as much as 6% lower then with resizable bar disabled, which brings us back to our
chocolate analogy, doesn't it? It's perhaps unsurprising that there's little
change on Flight Sim 2020, given how CPU-bound that game, but Invidia does manage to
eek out a slight improvement with Ryzen 5, while Radeon manages a bit
better frame rates on Ryzen 9. And Assassin's Creed Valhalla
was the call-out title that we found improvements
for in our previous video, and that continues today. Nvidia pulls a respectable
six to 9% improvement across the board, but then again that pales
in comparison to team red, pulling way ahead of stock with up to 18% higher performance.
Given the way that both teams
are going back and forth here, it seems like additional
optimizations can still be made for resizable bar on both sides,
which is really promising. Finally, CS GO, it's an older title that already runs well on
hardware of this caliber, but we still manage to
see a slight improvement in minimum frame rates, at the cost of some average FPS, which is a price that most
players should be willing to pay for the reasons that I outlined before. There is no price, by the way for the new sticker
packs that lttstore.com, free with every order, checkmate Nvidia. Moving on to 1440P. You might not expect
things to get better here, but you'd be wrong. While GeForce stays more or less the same in Shadow of The Tomb Raider, Radeon pulls two to 4% ahead with Ryzen 5, and where GeForce loses
in minimum frame rates for no gain on Ryzen 9, Radeon manages to gain
about as many average frames as it loses in minimums, which in a non-competitive
title like this one might be an okay trade-off.
GTA V is a bit all over
the place, with Ryzen 5, more or less on par with stock
performance on both teams, with a slight tip to Radeon, and Ryzen 9 pulling as
much of a win on GeForce as Radeon loses. It's almost like Nvidia stole the frames right out Elisa Sue's pocket. And, F1 2020, again, shows improvements as high as 13% with the
only maybe regression coming from Nvidia's average
frame rates on Ryzen 9, but we're talking a mere 1% difference, Nvidia comes out ahead in
performance improvements for minimum frame rates here, while Radeon pulls better averages.
As for Forza, there is
no other way to put it, it is a staggering win for Radeon, their worst improvement here is 13%, and yes, your eyes are working fine. That is a nearly 20% gain for Radeon's minimum frame rates. Now, to be clear, Nvidia still wins. Everybody wins when they go
over 100% of stock performance, they just don't win as hard. Now with a little extra
emphasis on the GPU, thanks to our higher resolution, Flight Sim 2020 shows us
near universal improvements, with Radeon actually pulling
a healthy 8% improvement in minimum frame rates on Ryzen 9. And then Assassin's Creed is once again a bigger win for AMD
than it is for Nvidia, with improvements reaching
16% for both CPUs, and Nvidia managing a very respectable six to 9% lead overstock performance. Isn't it nice when everybody wins, guys? Too bad it doesn't
always work out that way. CS GO at 1440p resulted in straight up performance
regressions across the board with the sole exception
being minimum frame rates on Ryzen 9 for Radeon. GeForce takes the worst
of it though, here, with up to a 20% performance loss with resizable bar enabled.
That's as big a loss as the largest gains we've seen today. Maybe that's why Nvidia's driver has an easy to find indicator for whether the feature is active. I guess AMD felt it was less
likely that users with it enabled would be troubleshooting
performance problems. Looking at the big picture here, though. Radeon has the best average gains, running roughly 6% faster
than stock at 1440p, and 2% faster at 1080p. While Nvidia's gains hover around 2%, regardless of the resolution. That means one of two things. Either AMD's memory management for Radeon is worse than Nvidia's for GeForce, or Nvidia has some more
optimization work to do.
The work they've done already
since our previous video has clearly paid off handsomely though, so either way it goes, we'll hopefully keep
on seeing improvements with future driver
revisions on both sides. On that subject, by the way, get subscribed because Nvidia
finally rolled a driver that fixes the code 43 error, and we are gonna be all
over that in a future video. Changing gears a bit, by now we know that productivity tends not to be affected
much by resizable bar, at least for AMD. But for fun, we did some runs so that we could validate
that for Nvidia, as well. Blender, well, it's 100%, yup. 100% of stock performance. So how about that? PugetBench shows some dips,
especially in AfterEffects, although which CPU causes the dip changes depending on which team
GPU you're batting for, and then LuxMark shows basically flat with our Ryzen 9 GeForce combo managing to lose some performance.
This clearly isn't the norm, but it's worth taking into
account that some applications may suffer for those
sweet, sweet gaming gains. So then. Resizable bar, should you turn it on? Assuming that your
motherboard manufacturer has rolled out a BIOS with support, and that you have a compatible
GPU, the answer's yes. We found that so far there are more situations where it helps than situations where it hurts, and like with our chocolate
bar, where it hurts, the benefits of the tasty
snack seem far more noticeable than what went missing. Now, if only they could enable
it for previous gen GPUs.
Just like I enable you guys
to hear about our sponsor. The Drop Sennheiser HD 6XX headphones are one of Drop's all time best sellers with over 90,000 units sold. They haven't changed the
driver or sound structure compared to the HD 650s, so it delivers a beautiful,
balanced mid-range, and natural-sounding base, and its open back design allows
auditorium-like acoustics for accurate sound reproduction.
It's got a detachable six-foot-cable, instead of a 10-foot-cable, this change was based
on community feedback, and has a 1/8 inch plug, with a quarter inch adapter
included in the box. So don't wait, get yours today, at the link in the video description. So thanks for watching guys. Go check out our previous
investigation into resizable bar on Nvidia's mobile platform
for a little more context on how far Nvidia's
implementation has come in such a short period of time. (upbeat music ending).
