Older Nvidia GPUs could achieve higher frame rates with this unofficial tweak, but we don’t recommend it
Nvidia GTX 16 and RTX 20 series GPUs could get a bit of a performance boost thanks to a new mod that brings the Resizable BAR (or ReBAR) feature to these graphics cards.
A quick refresher: ReBAR first came to light around the turn of the century as AMD’s Smart Access Memory feature, which tweaks PCIe’s Resizable BAR to overcome certain limitations on the memory front to boost performance in some games by quite a bit ( we will come back there).
Nvidia and Intel also adopted ReBAR, but in Team Green’s case, support was only offered with RTX 3000 graphics cards, leaving previous generation products out in the cold at the time.
Meet developer ‘Terminatorul’s new invention: a UEFI driver that allows ReBAR to work with older GTX 1600 and RTX 2000 graphics cards.
If Tom’s hardware According to reports, the tool in question is called NvStrapsReBar and it patches your motherboard’s UEFI firmware to set the customizable BAR size to pursue slightly faster frame rates with these GPUs.
As good as this idea sounds in principle, there are some major snags here, meaning that for most people this is an endeavor best left alone – and we’ll explore that next.
Analysis: Risk vs. Reward
The task of patching the motherboard in this way comes with risks, and if something goes wrong it can be very bad news for your PC (we’re talking about bricking the territory). Since this is an unofficial trick for ReBAR support, we really don’t recommend trying this unless you are very tech savvy and confident about what you are doing.
Even then, we would still advise against it, because with relatively old Nvidia GPUs like these models, the gains ReBAR will bring will likely be on the meager side. While SAM for AMD GPUs heralded some significant frame rate increases some PC games, in this particular scenario you’re probably looking at small gains, if not much at all (a few percent extra frames per second).
Yes, you may be able to achieve more with certain games, but it will be a bit of a lottery. You might also see no improvement at all, or perhaps even a small negative effect. There are simply too many uncertainties and risk-reward imbalance in our opinion if we go this route, given the potential dangers of a major hardware failure as mentioned.
Still, the option is there for those who want to take it, and more choice is never a bad thing.