PowerColor Red Devil AMD RADEON 6800XT REVIEW - WITH and WITHOUT SAM

Image taken from PowerColor's official website

With the new AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT, AMD is making a big comeback to the graphic cards market, and is even taking on NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 3080.

The AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT is based on AMD’s RDNA 2 graphics architecture. AMD has worked in some new features and boosted performance efficiency, which makes it better than their predecessors.

With the new Radeon RX 6800 XT, AMD brings the optional feature of Smart Access Memory to help increase performance, depending on games. With a Radeon RX 6000 series graphics card and a motherboard/CPU combo which supports the optional PCIe “Resizable BAR” feature, gamers can see improvement in performance in some titles, effectively giving users a free performance upgrade.

According to AMD, SAM will give up to extra 10% performance, but requires disabling CSM on your BIOS, and enable Above 4G Decoding and Re-Size Bar Support. We tested SAM on a few titles, and the results are dependent on the titles.

The following titles were tested with our system which includes: Ryzen 9 5900X, 32GB of DDR4 RAM 3200Mhz, 850W Power Supply, and of course the RX 6800 XT.

Assassin’s Creed Odyssey

Assassin’s Creed Odyssey does not benefit greatly from Smart Access Memory Support. However, the marginal increases in performance we see are still welcome.

Far Cry 5: New Dawn

Similar to Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, Far Cry 5 does not receive a huge boost in performance. It is still slightly better with SAM support.

Shadow of The Tomb Raider

For Shadow of The Tomb Raider, the difference in performance is small. With having SAM enabled or disabled giving the same frames per seconds.

Crysis Remastered

Crysis Remastered showed similar results to previous titles, having little improvement with SAM enabled.

Assassin’s Creed Valhalla

For Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, it is a big win for Smart Access Memory. With Smart Access Memory, you can see a huge boost in performance for all three resolutions. While other results are not positive, these gains alone highlight the potential of Smart Access Memory.

Smart Access Memory is amazing, allowing games to overcome performance limitations. Assassin’s Creed Valhalla is a great example to show the potential of Smart Access Memory, though it is worth noting that some games will see no difference from Smart Access Memory.

Today’s games are not designed with Smart Access Memory in mind yet, so you can expect game developers to design SAM support in the games in the near future.

Even without SAM, the RX 6800 XT is a great graphics card for 4K gaming, with performance on par with the NVIDIA GeForce 3080.