Nvidia releases GeForce 465.89 WHQL drivers, adds Resizable BAR on GeForce RTX 30

On: March 30, 2021

As expected, Nvidia announced the launch of its new GeForce 465.89 WHQL graphics drivers, incorporating improvements such as support for Resizable BAR technology in its GeForce RTX 30 graphics, promising improvements of up to 11.9 percent.

This is a very topical day, as the Rocket Lake-S processors have just been officially announced, and in fact, we have reviews of the i9-11900K and i5-11600K.  But now it's up to NVIDIA and its new release, the equivalent of Smart Access Memory (AMD SAM). Let's see how to activate it.

NVIDIA finally launches Resizable BAR in RTX 30 graphics: this is how it is activated. The NVIDIA Resizable BAR is now available in RTX 30 graphics: is your CPU / Board compatible?

As we say, NVIDIA is fulfilling its promise by the hair, since they announced that they would make this important technology compatible with all their RTX 30 before the end of March. It had already been made available in their Founders Edition, but now it supports more games and can be activated on any RTX 30.

It is important that you are clear about what Resizable BAR is. Basically, in a normal computer, the processor only has the ability to see a 256MB portion of the VRAM memory each time it accesses it. For a few years, there has been a capacity in the PCI Express bus that is called precisely this (Resizable BAR) and that was used for the first time with Smart Access Memory from AMD at the end of last year. What is achieved by resizing the BAR is that the processor can see the entire address space of the VRAM and not a small portion at a time.

In this way, we achieve a performance improvement that can be substantial. Specifically, NVIDIA talks about FPS improvements of up to 12%, which obviously corresponds to the results of a skewed game selection, as is often the case with any AMD, Intel or NVIDIA announcement. Still, we can expect at least a 5% improvement in each supported game, which is pretty decent data.

Game support and how to activate ReBAR

In addition to the drivers, a compatible processor and motherboard (with the latest BIOS) are required:

  • AMD Ryzen 5000 Processor + AMD 500/400 Series Motherboards
  • 11th / 10th Gen Intel Core Processors + Intel Z490, H470, B460 and H410 Motherboards

Graphics card vBIOS update required (except GeForce RTX 3060):

To activate this functionality, the first thing we must clarify is that it is not necessary to touch anything on the VBIOS of the RTX 3060, but other RTX 30 graphics cards may require it, especially if it is not from the latest shipments. Thus, the update process looks like this:

  1. Please confirm that your CPU is AMD Ryzen 5000, 11th Gen Intel, or 10th Gen Intel and your motherboard has AMD 400 series, AMD 500 series, or Intel Z490 / H470 / B460 / H410 chipsets. Other types of processors or boards may not be compatible.
  2. Update your motherboard BIOS to the latest version, as long as you cannot find a Resizable BAR or similar option in your BIOS settings.
  3. Activate the Resizable BAR in the BIOS.
  4. Update your graphics card drivers to the latest version from NVIDIA.
  5. If you don't have an RTX 3060 but rather an RTX 30, here's the good thing: you may need a VBIOS update to update the Resizable BAR. Fortunately, the manufacturers provide their updated tools, so there is no need to resort to any black magic for this. We leave you the links that NVIDIA has published:

If you combine all this, you already have Resizable BAR in the following games:

  • Assassin's Creed Valhalla
  • Battlefield v
  • Borderlands 3
  • Control
  • Cyberpunk 2077
  • Death stranding
  • DIRT 5
  • F1 2020
  • Forza Horizon 4
  • Gears 5
  • Godfall
  • Hitman 2
  • Hitman 3
  • Horizon zero dawn
  • Metro Exodus
  • Red Dead Redemption 2
  • Watch Dogs Legion

These drivers also add support for RayTracing in the latest DiRT 5 update, support for new releases such as Outriders and Evil Genius 2: World Domination, SLI support in Shenmue III and The Medium (on Turing GPUs nothing else), support for the OpenCL 3.0 API, and support for 8K TVs is improved.

Otherwise, the smoke pixelation in Rainbow Six Siege is fixed under the Vulkan API; the crash of X4: Foundations with a GeForce RTX 30 and the Vulkan API; blue screenshots of death on the GeForce RTX 3090 with the Samsung Odyssey G9 next to an HDMI TV and the GeForce RTX 2060 when playing games and watching a YouTube video simultaneously; the green corruptions in Sunset Overdrive; or the increase in consumption in idle with Ampere and Turing GPUs connected to G-Sync monitors with high refresh rates.

You can download the Nvidia GeForce 465.89 WHQL drivers from this link.

We hope that this functionality will be expanded over time, with support for more games, and especially more graphics, CPUs, and boards, since the list is currently quite limited.

If you have already tried Resizable BAR on your GPU, feel free to leave us your experience in the comment box: have you noticed any performance improvements?

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