Asus has reportedly enabled AMD Smart Access Memory (SAM) on first-generation Ryzen processors, according to a Reddit user. AMD's SAM feature allows the processor full access to the GPU's memory, removing some memory limitations and providing dramatic performance gains of up to 10% in some games. SAM currently only works with AMD's Big Navi graphics cards in conjunction with Ryzen 5000 series processors and a 500 series motherboard, and it was believed that the feature would not be available for older chips due to the way it handled a particular instruction (PDEP).
However, AMD not only confirmed that SAM does not depend on PEDP, some card manufacturers have recently extended support for AMD 400 series motherboards and Intel 400 series motherboards as well. Now, we are seeing motherboard vendors enable SAM support on first-generation Ryzen processors. Reddit user Merich98 claims that he got the feature to work with an AMD Ryzen 7 1700 processor running on an ASUS B450-PLUS motherboard running the latest 2409 BIOS released in early December. Merich98 also tested the performance of Doom Eternal and Shadow of the Tom Raider. However, the results are not that promising and show that SAM does not make much of a difference in performance. For example, with AMD SAM disabled, Doom Eternal was running at an average FPS of 125.6 FPS, dropping 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 6.2%. "As you can see, most of the differences are in the margin of error, with the minimum FPS having a big impact, indicating performance degradation with AMD Smart Access memory enabled on an older graphics card." , noted the Reddit user. Via: Wccftech