Smart Access Memory

As I promised you on 23 November, this time we decided not to let you wait to see how the latest AMD graphics card behaves on a Ryzen platform 2020. Of course, this time it was easier for us to do this article, because a lot of the tests we have already done for the article published on November. For this reason, for today’s launch we only had to test the AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT, which is true… 5 times.

Thus, I tested the launcher board twice (with and without Rage Mode), and then performed three sets of tests on the platform equipped with AMD Ryzen 9 5950 X – default, with SAM activated, respectively with Rage Mode and SAM activated. For those unfamiliar with the subject, Smart Access Memory is a technology based on the new AMD processors in the Ryzen series 5000, launched two weeks ago , along with an X chipset motherboard 570 and an AMD Radeon RX series graphics card 6000. Smart Access Memory offers the processor the opportunity to access the entire amount of VRAM memory, which normally has access only to MB).

However, although AMD first implemented this feature on AMD RX series graphics cards 6000, the technology itself has been around for some time in PCI-E specifications, with most motherboards having the two necessary options (Above 4G Decode and Resizable Bar Support) present in the BIOS. As a result, we may soon see this feature used by any CPU / GPU combination, whether we’re talking about AMD, Nvidia or Intel.

Until then, however, to benefit from this technology, we need an AMD processor from the Ryzen series 5000, and we used the top of the range AMD Ryzen 9 for today’s test 5950 X, along with the rest of the components used on the VGA test platform – version 5000.