SAM with Ryzen 9 5950X
Having Ryzen 5000 Series at the helm is instructive as it is, for now, the only way to improve performance further by activating Smart Access Memory (SAM). Availed through a BIOS switch, we have benchmarked six games across three resolutions. SAM improvements depend on many factors, including game engine and resolution, so the above graphs offer a reasonable indication of what one can expect across various titles.
Borderlands 3 scales to 181ps, or 22fps higher than on 3950X without SAM at FHD. Forza sees a 13.3 per cent hike at QHD. AMD uses this combination of R9 5000 Series and SAM to extract maximum performance when comparing against RTX 3080/90. This SAM-led advantage appears to be shortlived as motherboard manufacturers are busy readying the same technology for Intel CPUs that have supported the underlying Resize Bar for many generations.
