During last night’s event dedicated to the Radeon RX 6000, AMD briefly mentioned an important news call Smart Access Memory which could further complicate the purchase decisions of enthusiasts not only with regard to the video card , but also the CPUs. The Sunnyvale house has decided to leverage the synergy between its intellectual properties to convince users to realize systems entirely made up of AMD hardware .

Smart Access Memory, which requires a series motherboard 500, a Ryzen CPU 5000 and a Radeon RX GPU 6000 , is a functionality that improves gaming performance (up to 11% according to internal tests you see below) by intervening on the data that is transferred between the CPU and the GPU, giving the microprocessor full access to the 16 GB of VRAM of the new video cards , where previously it could access a fraction of it. It is not clear at the moment the role of the Infinity Cache, another interesting novelty of the new cards that is somewhat reminiscent of the large L3 cache of Ryzen CPUs, but AMD has not yet talked to us in depth about these new features.

As mentioned above, the Smart Access Memory feature is able to reduce memory fragmentation within the VRAM, improving performance and efficiency . Usually CPU and GPU have a limit in data transfer and this requires game developers to often turn to the CPU and system memory (RAM) when the data set exceeds a certain size: it is therefore created an inefficiency that not only slows performance, but also has an impact on consumption . Smart Access Memory was created to remove this limitation, improving performance thanks to a faster data transfer between CPU and GPU and reducing consumption due to the lower bounce of information between the various components.

The technology will be activated by BIOS and to extract the maximum return the developers will have to program their titles taking into account Smart Access Memory . It is unclear at the moment whether any kind of improvement is achieved with non-optimized games.

AMD is currently – waiting for Intel to bring dedicated video cards to the market – the only company to have high-performance CPUs and Gaming GPU. With Smart Access Memory the company takes a further step in that vision that started many, many years ago, when it decided to acquire ATi Technologies to build CPU with integrated GPU. It is clear that that acquisition – which financially was a bloodbath – turned out to be almost 15 years more apt than ever and today AMD is reaping the rewards, with the presence of its own chips in the consoles and the synergies between multiple components that could give it a competitive advantage over the competition in the PC sector.