Discussion AMD RX 6000 series GPU and Smart Access Memory - AMD's secret sauce?

[alceryes]

When the new AMD RX 6000 series cards were revealed a couple techies and gaming enthusiasts were scratching their heads a bit. Putting a full 16GBs of VRAM in even the lowest tier card is a benefit to the end user, no doubt, but it did seem like a lot to some. I think it may have to do with AMD's future Smart Access Memory plans. According to AMD, SAM will give a 5-11% FPS performance increase. But this is just the first generation of Smart Access Memory. I'll bet that AMD has plans to increase the performance gain of SAM in future iterations. If this were true, it would add an important reason to put more VRAM on as many cards as AMD can.

Of course, we'll need to wait and see. A dozen third party reviews are much more reliable than any single review from either AMD or NVIDIA. Definitely an interesting time for both the CPU and GPU market.

Thoughts?

 

[tennis2]

Putting more VRAM on a GPU increases manufacturing costs though. Nvidia has historically been more VRAM efficient than AMDs "brute force" approach.

I think SAM is a marketing tool for AMD to peddle more CPUs (since that's required to use the feature). That's certainly not a bad tactic, but as a company you'd better be able to justify a BoM/margins change like that. You don't just willy nilly throw resources in that don't increase performance

 

[alceryes]

True, but I don't think it's just marketing. There's nothing wrong with creating additional synergistic performance boosts when using AMD's 5000 series CPUs. It's not like AMD hid the fact that a 5000 series CPU is required for SAM. Quite the opposite - they touted it.
AMD already obtained the CPU gaming performance crown with these new CPUs, regardless of whether you use an NVIDIA or AMD GPU. So, it's not like they used SAM to 'catch up'.

I say let them tighten the belt on both Intel and NVIDIA even more. Make the opposition give me more performance per dollar!

 

[hotaru.hino]

Also agree that SAM is simply a marketing gimmick. Looking around on the internet, this looks more like AMD branding an already existing feature of PCIe called PCIe Resizable BAR. And this has been a feature available in Windows and Linux for a while

 

[renz496]

Putting more VRAM on a GPU increases manufacturing costs though. Nvidia has historically been more VRAM efficient than AMDs "brute force" approach.

this. we already saw a situation where nvidia 4GB (or 3GB) cards end up being better vs AMD 4GB card in certain games.

 

[renz496]

And nvidia finally just announced their own version of SAM that should work on either intel or AMD CPU.

 

[alceryes]

And nvidia finally just announced their own version of SAM that should work on either intel or AMD CPU.

This is a perfect example of why this type of competition is great for the consumer. I'll bet NVIDIA is accelerating the release of their version of SAM as a direct result of AMD releasing SAM.
NVIDIA's version looks better than AMD's too! Any CPU, PCIe 3.0 boards...that's awesome!