Resizable BAR on Intel® Arc™ Graphics

What’s that oddly-named feature called “Resizable BAR” all about? Why does it matter? Don’t fear the ReBAR because TAP and Ryan have all the details in their latest video.

In GPUs, ReBAR isn’t a metal stick for strengthening concrete – but it does strengthen your gaming experience. We’ve been transparent that Resizable BAR (Base Address Register) is required to get a good experience with Intel® Arc™ hardware and it all comes down to how the GPU reads memory. In TAP’s words:

Resizable BAR is a pretty weirdly-named PCI Express feature and what it does is it allows transactions that originate on the CPU (like reads and writes) that are targeting GPU memory to be bigger.

So game data like textures, shaders, and geometry are constantly being written to the GPU’s VRAM from the CPU’s RAM. Without ReBAR enabled those transactions are smaller in size and the memory controller gets bombarded with tons of small data transfers. As TAP explains it:

That happens on things like scene changes, or when you load a new level or there’s a new effect happening. That’s why when you look at frametime charts you’ll see “ReBAR off” will generally result in spikes that were already there getting bigger.

The solution? Turn ReBAR on! It’s a motherboard feature so you’ll have to check your computer’s BIOS settings to enable it; check out this Intel Quick Start Guide for a how-to. There you’ll notice the supported platforms include 10^th Gen and newer Intel® Core™ processors and most AMD Ryzen™ 3000 and all Ryzen 5000 CPUs. We want to ensure you get the best experience on Arc graphics regardless of your CPU preference.

We’ve got more videos with Ryan & TAP’s banter and describing Intel Arc features on their way soon, all of which you’ll find right here at arc.intel.com. Thanks for watching and being a part of our journey!

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