re: PC Discussion - Gaming, Performance and Enthusiasts

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Why is this important? Previously, CPUs have only been able to access a tiny fraction of a graphics card’s memory banks – just 256MB, to be precise. At the moment, game developers use that tiny 256MB of memory to enable CPUs to occasionally handle things like buffers, polygon meshes, and texture and geometry data. In the distant past of 17 years ago, this wasn’t a huge problem given that GPU memory wasn’t much bigger than that in the first place. Now, though, it’s a different story, as all three of AMD’s new Big Navi GPUs have a whopping 16GB of GDDR6 memory apiece – and with Smart Access Memory, a Ryzen 5000 CPU will be able to access the whole lot of it.

Naturally, being stuck with just 256MB doesn’t give developers a lot of space to play with, and it means the CPU ends up making lots of calls to your graphics card’s memory banks, which increases your PC’s overall performance overhead and slows down your gaming speeds as a result. By allowing a CPU to have full access to that GPU memory, that performance overhead is dramatically reduced, allowing everything to speed up in order to increase those frame rates.

At the moment, AMD have seen performance gains of between 5-11% in titles they’ve tested internally – and, as we saw during AMD’s Big Navi event, up to 13% when you combine it with the RX 6000’s one-click overclocking feature called Rage Mode. That might not sound like a whole lot in practice, but AMD believe that once game developers are able to start testing it for themselves, we’ll see even bigger gains start to emerge over time.

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are nvidia's launches always this bad or is covid really the reason behind the lack of stock?

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