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What is resizable BAR and how to enable it

Net yourself a few extra frames for free

Updated: Mar 21, 2023 9:20 am
What is resizable BAR and how to enable it

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If you want to net yourself a few extra frames then consider enabling resizable BAR. The BIOS feature is an advanced feature of PCI express to help with the communication between your hardware. With a lower latency gains a performance increase in theory.

When exploring a world in a game, the VRAM on a GPU has to keep transferring geometry, shaders, and textures via small packets to the CPU. With higher quality textures and higher resolutions, the required information is growing ever bigger and hard to transfer.

This buffer has limited bandwidth and with small packets only it is a very inefficient transfer and quite slow. So resizable BAR is a feature to minimize the queue and delay. It allows for assets to be requested as needed and in full. Allowing the CPU to more efficiently access the frame buffer, as well as being able to do multiple transfers concurrently.

How to enable resizable BAR

Step

1

Update everything

To gain access to resizable BAR you have to have all components and software up to date. You need: an updated motherboard BIOS, the latest graphics driver, an updated VBIOS if you have a RTX 3060 Ti, 3070, 3080, 3090, or older GPU.

Motherboard and GPU BIOS you will need to acquire from the manufacturer of your components. But GPU driver you can find at Nvidia.

nvidia driver downloads page

Step

2

Open BIOS

Either mashing (or holding) DEL or F2 or other function key depending on your motherboard while booting up your PC should get you in. Or from Windows accessing the recovery restart to troubleshoot UEFI settings should also do the job.

Access BIOS

Step

3

Find the settings

BIOS varies between manufacturers, so you might be lucky and have the option for resizable BAR on the easy mode screen. However, if like ours you have a simpler one you will need to find the options to turn it on. In advanced settings it may not be immediately there but may first need above 4G decoding.

In our AORUS BIOS we need to head to advanced settings, and IO ports to find the relevant settings.

advanced mode enter settings

Step

4

Enable above 4G decoding and resizable BAR support

Once you have the settings required enable above 4G decoding, and re-size BAR support. Sometimes the second option may not appear until the first one is accepted.

When that is done be sure to head to save & exit and save and restart to enjoy the feature.

above 4g decoding and resizeable bar

Just a few easy steps to get yourself the most performance out of your hardware. Even if it does require a bit of setup it will be worth it in the long run and get resizable bar active on your PC.


With a background in engineering and PC gaming, Seb is a staff writer with a focus on GPU, storage, and power supplies. Also one of tech supports in the office he likes helping and solving problems.

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