Nvidia GTX 16 and RTX 20 series GPUs can benefit from a new update that adds the Resizable BAR (or ReBAR) capability.
A short refresher: ReBAR first appeared at the turn of the decade as AMD’s Smart Access Memory feature, which modifies PCIe’s Resizable BAR to remove certain memory limits, boosting speed by a significant amount in particular games (we’ll get back to that).
Nvidia and Intel both adopted ReBAR, although Team Green’s support was limited to RTX 3000 graphics cards, leaving previous-generation products out in the cold.
Developer ‘Terminatorul’ has created a UEFI driver that allows ReBAR to work with older GTX 1600 and RTX 2000 graphics cards.
According to Tom’s Hardware, the utility in issue is called NvStrapsReBar, and it patches your motherboard’s UEFI firmware to allow you to modify the resizable BAR size in order to achieve somewhat better frame rates with these GPUs.
As nice as this notion seems in theory, there are several significant drawbacks, which means that most people should avoid this activity – which we’ll discuss next
Analysis: Risk Versus Reward
Patching the motherboard in this manner is risky, and if something goes wrong, it might be disastrous for your computer. Given that this is an unauthorized fudge for ReBAR support, we would not recommend doing it unless you are extremely tech-savvy and confident in your abilities.
Even still, we’d advise against it because, with relatively old Nvidia GPUs like these, the advantages from ReBAR are likely to be small. SAM for AMD GPUs did bring in some large frame rate enhancements in several PC games, but in this particular circumstance, you’re probably looking at small gains of not much at all (a few percent extra frames per second).
Yes, you might receive a little more with certain games, but it’s a bit of a gamble; you could also notice no improvement at all, or even a little negative impact. Given the potential consequences of a significant hardware failure, we believe there are simply too many unknowns and an off-kilter risk-reward balance to go down this path.
Still, the option is available to those who want to take it, and having more options is always a good thing.
