Asus has allegedly enabled AMD Smart Access Memory (SAM) on first-generation Ryzen CPUs, according to a Reddit user.
AMD’s SAM feature facilitates the CPU having full access to GPU memory, lifting certain memory constraints and giving considerable performance gains of up to 10% in some games.
SAM currently only works with AMD’s Big Navi graphics cards in tandem with Ryzen 5000 series processors and a 500-series motherboard, and it was believed the feature wouldn’t come to older chips due to the way they handled a particular instruction (PDEP).
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However, not only has AMD confirmed that SAM doesn’t depend on PEDP, but some board manufacturers have recently extended support on AMD's 400-series and also Intel's 400-series motherboards.
Now, we’re seeing motherboard vendors enabling support for SAM on first-generation Ryzen CPUs. Reddit user Merich98 claims he got the feature to work with an AMD Ryzen 7 1700 CPU running on an ASUS B450-PLUS motherboard that was running the latest 2409 BIOS which released in early December.
Merich98 also tested the performance in Doom Eternal and Shadow of the Tom Raider. However, the results aren’t all that promising, and show that SAM doesn’t make much of a difference in performance.
For example, with AMD SAM disabled, Doom Eternal ran at an average FPS of 125.6, increasing to just 125.9 FPS with SAM enabled. Overall, the Reddit user noted an average FPS increase of just 0.839%, while the minimum FPS dropped by 6.2%.
“As you can see, most of the differences are within the margin of error while the minimum FPS take a huge hit which indicates performance degradation with AMD Smart Access Memory enabled on an older generation graphics card,” the Reddit user noted.
