- AMD has certainly enjoyed the high ground
for some time now.
But is it over?
MSI doesn't think so,
which is why they've sponsored today's video,
giving us a sneak peek at something really exciting.
Take a look at... (grunts)
This!
The GE76 Raider.
"Big deal," you might say.
Sure, it comes in a cool etched Tiamat edition,
but at the end of the day,
isn't it just yet another Intel/Nvidia laptop?
Oh, no, no!
This one is different.
This laptop support Resizable BAR
like AMD does with their Smart Access Memory.
That means that this Intel CPU
can access all of this Nvidia GPU's memory at once,
just like a Ryzen and Radeon pairing can.
Could this be what Intel needs to fight back against AMD?
I mean, honestly speaking,
I doubt that MSI really gives a flying (beep).
(wings flapping)
(gun bangs)
(carcass thuds)
They're playing it both ways anyway.
But this back and forth can only mean more laptops
flying off the shelves to consumers,
so I guess that's why they're raining marketing funds
into this fiery showdown.
(upbeat music)
Just so we're clear, this is not a review.
We're only testing this machine today
in an on-versus-off configuration.
But we should still get to know it a little better
so that you guys know what to expect
and so MSI doesn't get mad at us.
It's got a 17.3" 300-hertz IPS display
that should keep our RTX 3080 Max-P busy
despite its 1080p resolution.
Under the hood, ours has a Core i7-10870H,
32 gigs of DDR4 3200-megahertz RAM,
and a 1-terabyte NVMe SSD in one of two M.2 slots.
It's got a beefy five-heat pipe cooler
for the CPU and GPU that MSI calls their Cooler Boost 5,
and feeding the beast is a 280-watt power brick
and a 99.9-watt-hour battery that's, let's be honest,
is essential if you're gonna run this thing off the wall,
especially in the Extreme Performance mode
in Dragon Center.
In order to toggle Resizable BAR on and off
we're gonna use an Nvidia driver that supports it
and one that doesn't.
Simple.
Er, unlike these results.
"Shadow of the Tomb Raider" in traditional rendering mode
actually got slower with Resizable BAR enabled
and was identical when we turned on ray-traced shadows.
"Wolfenstein: Youngblood"
at least picks up a couple of frames at minimum,
but nothing big,
and again, has little to boast about
when ray tracing is enabled.
"F1 2020" is a title that saw significant performance uplift
with Smart Access Memory in our Radeon 6800 review,
but it loses a few minimum frames
with Resizable BAR enabled here,
while "Flight Simulator 2020" does gain a frame or two,
but just a frame or two.
Finally, "CS:GO,"
a big winner for Smart Access Memory on AMD,
sees, well, a tangible increase in minimum frame rates
and not much else.
For fun we ran 3DMark to see if a synthetic test
might show us more of a difference,
but it was within half a percent either way.
When we moved to Blender,
we're once again looking at minimal differences
to the point where it's tough to say
that there's any real difference here at all.
It's a second faster in CUDA BMW,
but then a second slower in OptiX Classroom.
And LuxMark has Resizable BAR losing
by about 2% across the board.
So does Photoshop, with DaVinci Resolve and Premiere
coming within a single percentage point of difference.
SPECviewperf 2020 again gives us some brutal numbers.
Like, we're not far off,
but across the board it's on par
or slower than the traditional driver,
save for CATIA, where it went up a single point.
This all lends a fair bit of credence
to AMD's claim that Smart Access Memory
is more than simply enabling Resizable BAR support
and Nvidia's confidence
that they could match AMD's performance improvements
simply haven't materialized here.
So does Resizable BAR on Intel and Nvidia close the gap?
No-ot yet.
You're probably sitting there thinking,
"This is kinda a weird sponsored video experience so far,
showin' off this crazy, ballin', sexy gaming monstrosity
by highlighting how one of its key features
makes no difference at all."
But wait. There's far more to this story.
We reached out to MSI with our results and they said,
I'm paraphrasing a little bit here,
"Well, what are you, some kind of an idiot?
This is an early tech preview.
It's only validated under specific circumstance
'cause the ladies and gents in the lab
still have a lotta work to do, ya dunce!"
Oh, you guys. (sighs)
The good news is that we found one of those cases
where Resizable BAR makes a difference
for Intel and Nvidia today:
in "Assassin's Creed: Valhalla."
Now, because we only have one data point
and because we don't have an RDNA 2 mobile GPU yet,
we decided to throw together a desktop GPU bench
with an RX 6800 XT to inform our guesses
as to what the performance differences might look like
between Team Red and Team Bluish-Green in the future.
As it turns out, Team Red's still got an advantage
off of the starting line compared to Nvidia,
with roughly double the performance gain across the board.
That's still a significant departure, though,
from the rest of our results today
and it looks like these improvements scale proportionally
with the amount of additional power draw that we observed.
This shows that not only is there a lot of room
for performance to grow from here;
for laptop manufacturers like MSI
there's also an additional benefit.
Being able to increase core utilization
and keep the CPU working to feed the GPU
means that you could actually maintain higher performance
than you otherwise might in a thermally-constrained chassis.
And would you look at that?
This actually bears out
when we try testing the GE76 Raider in Silent Mode,
where the cooling system is limited for acoustics
and the CPU throttles clock speeds more aggressively.
Not only do we get better frame times
with Resizable BAR enabled,
we're getting them at a smaller increase
in power consumption.
So in the future, you might expect smaller laptops
to pack a bigger punch thanks to Resizable BAR.
And as for the big ones,
well, they'll just get better still.
Like our new underwear designs at LTTStore.com.
Oh, those are the old ones. Doesn't matter.
The point is, speaking of LTTStore,
make sure you get subscribed because, yes,
I do know about the counterfeit LTT merch out there
and I'm gonna have a video coming about it very soon.
Back on topic, though.
These performance results leave us with some questions,
like, "What does Resizable BAR even do
to get these kinds of results?"
and "Why did it take so long to get here?"
Resizable BAR is the official PCI-SIG term
for what AMD brands Smart Access Memory,
which allows a CPU to communicate
with all of a PCI Express device's memory at once
instead of in smaller 256-meg chunks,
which is a big deal because that is 1/64 the size
of the frame buffer in the RTX 3080 in our GE76 Raider.
While AMD only officially supports Smart Access Memory
on their 500-series chipsets,
MSI's been in the news for having enabled Resizable BAR
not only on 400-series AMD motherboards
but on Intel motherboards as old as their 300-series,
which means that owners of CPUs as old as 8th-gen core
can get in on the action too.
Now, this has been an optional part
of the PCI Express specification in some form
since at least around 2008,
but it's never really been thought of
as a desktop technology.
It makes sense.
I mean, Resizable BAR probably wouldn't
have even made much of a difference
even a couple of years ago,
where on average CPU thread counts weren't as high
and GPUs weren't shipping with tens of gigabytes of memory.
But when AMD moved first with their Smart Access Memory
for their Radeon 6000 series,
the industry took notice.
As the kids say,
"It's free real estate."
And AMD's platform took advantage of it out of the gate,
at least for some games, giving them a head start.
This left Intel and Nvidia
scrambling to validate and enable a feature
that they were always able to turn on
but hadn't planned to introduce yet,
which is where the GE76 Raider came in.
While it might look like just another gaming laptop...
It's got that RGB, right?
It's going to be among the first with Resizable BAR support
for it's 10th-gen Core i7 and RTX 3080 Max-P,
once the official drivers land.
And as we've seen,
RTX 3080's mobile performance can be very good,
so chances are it'll only get better
as performance gains like we saw today
start showing up in more titles and getting embiggened.
And chances are that I'm gonna tell you
a little more about our sponsor MSI
here in the sponsorship portion of the video.
The GE76 Raider is their first gaming laptop
that's equipped with Wi-Fi 6E,
it uses a refined chassis
with their customizable light bar,
it's got up to an Intel Core i9 processor
and RTX 3080 Max-P,
it features their Duo Wave speakers and woofer,
with a full-HD webcam,
and, of course, Intel plus Nvidia Resizable BAR technology
for smoothing out your gaming experience.
You can check it out at the link below,
and ancient Babylonian goddesses have never looked so good.
Does someone know how to read cuneiform?
If you guys are lookin' for another video to watch,
maybe check out our deeper look at Smart Access Memory.
We're gonna have that linked down below.