AMD's smart performance boosting tech to benefit Intel CPUs, Nvidia GPUs
AMD's smart performance boosting tech to benefit Intel CPUs, Nvidia GPUs
(Web Desk) - AMD’s Smart Access Memory (SAM) performance boosting technology will eventually work with Intel and Nvidia hardware, it has emerged.
SAM facilitates the CPU having full access to GPU memory, lifting certain memory constraints and giving considerable performance gains (up to 10% in some games).
Right now, SAM only works with AMD’s new Big Navi graphics cards in tandem with Ryzen 5000 processors (and a 500-series motherboard), so only a niche set of gamers who have forked out for these latest products (and have been lucky enough to get an RX 6000 GPU) can benefit.
However, in an interview with PC World, AMD has made it clear that its GPU division is working with Intel, so SAM will be available to those with an RX 6000 graphics card and an Intel CPU (and motherboard).
The same goes for AMD’s CPU division, which is working with Nvidia to ensure that SAM will also benefit those with Ryzen processors and GeForce GPUs. It probably didn’t escape your attention that Nvidia has already said it’ll be bringing a similar kind of tech to RTX 3000 cards, as SAM works by tweaking PCIe’s resizable BAR (base address register), so there’s no reason it can’t work on non-AMD hardware.
Naturally, this latest announcement is clearly good news, because there was speculation that AMD might try to keep SAM as an exclusive benefit for those with an all-AMD setup, rather than working with rivals to bring it to a wider audience.
