AMD Smart Access Memory Tested, Benchmarked

Why would the CPU having access to more resources impact performance for titles such as Apex Legends and Serious Sam 4? Is it because for these titles the CPU is utilising the memory in lieu of the GPU, and therefore not enough to go around?
 
Thanks for the review.
Quick question: did you notice a change in GPU memory use / available memory ?

Am asking because I did see users saying that enabling SAM did decrease the available GPU memory so it would be nice to either see that debunked or confirmed.

Overall SAM does seem to give a nice boost but the performance decrease in some games is puzzling. Curious what this could be due to.

Still, the boost you get in several games is basically moving performance up a tier for free.
 
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SirDigby said:
Why would the CPU having access to more resources impact performance for titles such as Apex Legends and Serious Sam 4? Is it because for these titles the CPU is utilising the memory in lieu of the GPU, and therefore not enough to go around?
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It may be as simple as changing execution order of access to memory is enough, so something important is execute earlier because is same memory region, but with SAM enable it wait for other command to end execution.
Or some other overhead, look at Nvidia support, is not as easy as looks for comments.
 
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This article is largely academic though, since nobody, not even scalpers can find even a single Radeon 6k GPU to buy.

We see articles pub'd now that refer to vaporware products only available to the Privileged Elite, You Tubers and Tech Journalists.
 
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We are probably far away from this but If SAM improves so most titles give you ~15% performance and AMD develops DLSS-like feature it could be the real deal.
 
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Achaios said:
This article is largely academic though, since nobody, not even scalpers can find even a single Radeon 6k GPU to buy.

We see articles pub'd now that refer to vaporware products only available to the Privileged Elite, You Tubers and Tech Journalists.
Click to expand...

If you want it enough you can get one. You can't buy it online. Need to do some regular fashion detective work and hope you live close to a Microcenter as they do receive shipments. I got my hands on 6800 Nitro + and 5900X by asking the sales associates when they get truck in and going to store early to get in line and hope for the best.
 
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Achaios said:
This article is largely academic though, since nobody, not even scalpers can find even a single Radeon 6k GPU to buy.

We see articles pub'd now that refer to vaporware products only available to the Privileged Elite, You Tubers and Tech Journalists.
Click to expand...

Mindfactory has both 6800 and 6900XT in stock (no 6800 XT though, but they also list no 3800 or 3060Ti for that matter). Prices are way too high for my tastes, but the price difference between the „cheapest“ 6900XT and 3090 is exactly €500 which is the msrp difference.

But yes, if you don‘t mind the high prices, you can buy a 3070, 3090, 6800 or 6900XT right away.
 
Currently this is an AMD exclusive feature and judging by how they still haven’t fulfilled their U-turn on B450 boards and provided support for the 5xxx series CPUs on them yet it’s probably quite safe to say that Intel CPU support for SAM will lag behind AMD support. I mean they are literally dumping on their own consumers who bought a Radeon card because they didn’t buy an AMD CPU aswell.

Hopefully Nvidia won’t punish the user for their choice of CPU.
 
Shadowboxer said:
Currently this is an AMD exclusive feature and judging by how they still haven’t fulfilled their U-turn on B450 boards and provided support for the 5xxx series CPUs on them yet it’s probably quite safe to say that Intel CPU support for SAM will lag behind AMD support. I mean they are literally dumping on their own consumers who bought a Radeon card because they didn’t buy an AMD CPU aswell.

Hopefully Nvidia won’t punish the user for their choice of CPU.
Click to expand...

I don't know what you are trying to tell here. AMD has long time ago provided motherboard manufacturers AGESA that offer Zen3 support for 400-series motherboards. AMD has done what they promised.

SAM is AMD exclusive because Nvidia and Intel didn't thought about SAM before AMD did. AMD's fault that they did something Nvidia and Intel didn't :facepalm:
 
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SirDigby said:
Why would the CPU having access to more resources impact performance for titles such as Apex Legends and Serious Sam 4?
Click to expand...

Larger size of memory mapping requires more page table entries and can result in more TLB cache misses. The developers need to benchmark their apps with resizeable bar on and off to see the impact with hardware performance counters.

Sometimes features like huge pages that should have only positive performance effect decrease performance due to unintended effects, like changing virtual address space layout and hence causing more CPU cache collisions.
 
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Thank you for the good work. Although I am not a gamer I wonder if enabling SAM will help in the case of heavy workloads in graphical programs like AutoCAD.
 
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Was thinking of switching from 9900K to 5600x to pair with 6800 to enable SAM. Not sure that it’s worth it now though after seeing this.
 
Does anyone know if SAM could be enabled on Xbox Series X?

It uses a custom AMD Zen 2 and RDNA 2 architecture, but it is supposed to support all of the features AMD created for it.

I did some searching but didn’t turn up anything using “Smart Access Memory”, SAM, or ASAM.
 
Steve said:
You're not going to need to upgrade a 9900K for gaming, for..... a very very long time.
Click to expand...
Wow, an answer from Steve himself! Yeah I know I probably won’t need to upgrade the 9900K for a while yet but the thought of an all AMD build is appealing to me for some reason.
 
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Why didn't you test 3070 with SAM? Nvidia is supporting 3000 series cards and bios updates came out a few days ago.
 
HardReset said:
I don't know what you are trying to tell here. AMD has long time ago provided motherboard manufacturers AGESA that offer Zen3 support for 400-series motherboards. AMD has done what they promised.

SAM is AMD exclusive because Nvidia and Intel didn't thought about SAM before AMD did. AMD's fault that they did something Nvidia and Intel didn't :facepalm:
Click to expand...
Nvidia came out with SAM support a few days ago for 3000 series and bios updates came out a few days ago.
 
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