Before the official release of the new RTX 3060 killers, our colleagues at TechPowerUp were able to test the performance of Intel’s Arc A770 graphics card in more than 20 different games. As announced by Intelits new GPU is much more powerful than Nvidia’s famous RTX 3060but only on the condition of using it with other compatible components.
Indeed, Intel has designed its cards around ReBAR (Resizable BAR) technology, an equivalent to AMD’s Smart Access Memory. This is a technology that was already found on Nvidia’s RTX 3000s, and which essentially improves the communication between your processor and your graphics card.
What is ReBAR technology?
Usually, in game, your GPU requests textures, shaders and other resources from your CPU, which are stored in the video memory (VRAM) of your graphics card before being sent to the screen to display the images. So far, your CPU could only process 256MB chunks of VRAM at a time. This then multiplied the small transfers and created a significant bottleneck in games that require a lot of memory.
Now that graphics cards have always more video memory (16 GB on the Arc A770, but up to 24 GB on Nvidia’s latest RTX 4090), this solution was no longer viable. Thanks to Resizable BAR technology, your CPU can now access all stored information on your GPU. Because transfers are faster, performance is usually much higher.
Also read – Intel Arc A750: Nvidia’s new RTX 3060 rival arrives at just $289
Intel ARC graphics cards need ReBAR to run at full power
As TechPowerUp’s testing of the Intel ARC 770 on PCs with and without ReBAR shows, the difference is obvious. In FHD+, the graphics card gets 98.8 FPS on average on the various games tested, compared to only 79.9 FPS without ReBAR. The finding is the same in 1440p with 79.4 FPS with ReBAR and 64.7 without, and also in 4K with 48.8 FPS in 41.8 without.
The difference in performance is therefore of the order of 20%, which is enormous. Intel makes no secret of it, and warns consumers to make sure their computer is compatible with technology or with AMD’s Smart Access Memory, which does the same thing. Only the 10th Gen Intel Comet Lake, 11th Gen Rocket Lake and 12th Gen Alder Lake processors support this feature. As for AMD, SAM support is present only on Ryzen 3000 Zen 2 chips and newer generations. Also make sure you have a motherboard with PCI-E 4.0 lanes if you want to enjoy some extra FPS in-game.
Source: TechPowerUp