NVIDIA released Resizable Bar for all RTX 3000 GPUs - How to get it and is there a Performance Boost

After the announcement of AMD Smart Access Memory, the NVIDIA team quickly made up the gap and added an equivalent called Resizable Bar. First for their RTX 3060 graphics cards (the basic ones, with no Ti index), and today for the entire RTX 3000 series (including 3060 Ti, 3070, 3080 and 3090). The new technology expands the PCI-Express standard, so that the processor gets access to the entire memory of the graphics card instead of 256 Megabytes chunks.

This should improve the performance in supported games, increasing the average FPS and significantly reducing FPS drops. Now we will tell you how to install it, and if the marketing promises turned out to be true.

To install and enable the NVIDIA Resizable Bar, you need a supported motherboard, processor, motherboard BIOS, graphics card BIOS, and NVIDIA Game Ready 465.89 driver (or later).

All update steps will most likely take about half an hour and you perform them at your own risk. If you do not understand at all how to do this, it is better not to take risks or study each problem separately (like, what is BIOS and how to update it). Here's how to make it work:

• Check CPU, GPU, and motherboard compatibility with RB
• Update Windows 10 to the most recent version
• Update NVIDIA driver to version 465.89 or higher
• Update your motherboard BIOS
• Then update the BIOS of the video card

Download BIOS for the motherboard and video card ONLY FROM YOUR MANUFACTURER WEBSITE. Do not take files from unknown sources. A similar rule should be used to update the NVIDIA driver.

After a successful update of all mentioned devices, go to the motherboard BIOS and activate two PCI-Express extensions: Above 4G Decoding and Resizable Bar. The name may slightly differ, but they both stand side by side somewhere in the PCI-Express settings.

Now, when everything is working properly, a checkmark will appear in the GPU-Z utility and in the NVIDIA settings about the Resizable Bar support (in some localizations it was renamed to the Resizable Base Address Register or similar). Officially, this technology boosts the performance only in selected games, however, the reality is a bit better.

For March 2021, NVIDIA, like AMD SAM, promises an increase from using the Resizable Bar in only a small list of games:

• Assassin's Creed Valhalla
• Battlefield V
• Borderlands 3
• Control
• Cyberpunk 2077
• Death Stranding
• DIRT 5
• F1 2020
• Forza Horizon 4
• Gears 5
• Godfall
• Hitman 2
• Hitman 3
• Horizon Zero Dawn
• Metro Exodus
• Red Dead Redemption 2
• Watch Dogs Legion

However, the reality is much more pleasant: almost all games, even quite old ones, get some 3-5% increase, and sometimes even higher. The limit is somewhere at the level of 10-15%, exactly as promised for the most successful cases. We've tried DOOM (2016), Warzone, Survarium, Death Standing, and quite some other titles. Even modern GPU benchmarks work faster now with resizable bar.

Besides that, I am glad that various users in their first impressions and hardware testers all noted a decrease in rare and very rare FPS drops. So, your favorite competitive games and open-world adventure will surely benefit from the update.

Yes, this is a small one, but a victory: the free increase is always a great pleasure. The strange thing here is that the PCI-Express specification that provides this functionality has been around for over ten years. And it could have been conceived and implemented much earlier at the level of processors and video cards. Therefore, it is not entirely fair that the old models are overboard.

Some games may face issues, so keep an eye on new or more frequent crashes. They may presist in DirectX 12 and Vulkan API games, like Cyberpunk 2077 or Call of Duty: Warzone. Just be ready to disable this feature in BIOS, if you will face any errors.

Although, it will definitely please the players that the new feature does not increase the ETH hash rate, which means that the interest of miners will not grow: