AMD's Radeon RX 6000-series GPUs and Ryzen 5000-series CPUs might be hard to find right now but that isn't stopping motherboard manufacturers from rolling out support for some of the advanced features both bring to the table. One of those, dubbed AMD Smart Access Memory, was announced with the launch of the RX 6000-series and updates to incorporate support are now being made available; case in point: BIOSTAR, whose 500-series motherboards received BIOS upgrades this week.

AMD Smart Access Memory is a means by which a Ryzen 5000-series CPU can address the full extent of graphics VRAM at once, rather than only a fraction of it. It does this by leveraging a feature called 'Re-Size Base Address Register' (or Re-Size BAR), an aspect of the PCI-Express spec definition that has been underutilised in the consumer space.

Performance benefits from AMD Smart Access Memory vary wildly by application, with some games reporting over 10% improvements to FPS while others remain unchanged. Still, we're not ones to turn our noses up at free performance, so it's good to see motherboard manufacturers embrace the new specification.

In BIOSTAR's case the following 500-series motherboards now enjoy the feature after updates:



Later this month they expect to roll out new BIOS updates for the following 400-series boards, unlocking AMD SAM in an unofficial capacity:





Once updated, the feature can be enabled through the following steps:



AMD officially only support Smart Access Memory in systems powered by a combination of Ryzen 5000-series CPUs and Radeon 6000-series GPUs. Efforts by Intel and NVIDIA to implement support for similar technologies on their hardware may also... encourage AMD to take similar steps with other Ryzen and Radeon hardware, and has also persuaded motherboard vendors to look beyond just their 500-series designs.

More information on AMD Smart Access Memory is available at https://www.amd.com/en/technologies/smart-access-memory