Modders have successfully enabled ReBAR (Resizable BAR) support on earlier NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards through the unofficial NVStrapsReBar UEFI driver, circumventing NVIDIA’s own artificial segmentation and planned obsolescence of previous generation RTX 2000 / GTX 1600 GPUs.

AMD pioneered the concept of enabling the PCIe feature known as ReBAR (Resizable BAR) on consumer GPUs with the introduction of Smart Access Memory technology.

This technology, a component of the PCI specification, enables the CPU to access the entirety of the GPU memory space via the PCIe interconnect, eliminating bottlenecks and significantly enhancing gaming performance, with various titles gaining showcasing a performance improvement of around 10%. ReBAR / Smart Access Memory is a game changer.

Interestingly, most tech press outlets and commercialized YouTube reviewers opt not to activate this technology during their performance assessments. The exception is Ancient Gameplays, who consistently incorporates Resizable BAR in their performance tests for both NVIDIA GeForce and AMD Radeon hardware.

After AMD pushed for the mainstream adoption of ReBAR with their Smart Access Memory moniker, NVIDIA promptly embraced the technology for their graphics cards, offering a patch for the GeForce RTX 30 series, while motherboard manufacturers also joined in by enabling this feature on more motherboards allowing for the technology to be used on many different configurations.

Allowing for enhanced gaming performance on long since outdated hardware, such as AMD’s Polaris based RX 580 and RX VEGA graphics cards, despite being around five years old by the time the Resizable BAR actually started to be implemented.

A tool called ReBarUEFI is capable of patching the UEFI firmware to enable support for this feature on an even wider range of motherboards. However, there remains an unresolved challenge of enabling ReBAR on older GPUs themselves.

Modders have recently devised a fresh solution tailored for GeForce GTX 16 and RTX 20 series GPUs built on NVIDIA’s Turing architecture. Unfortunately, this solution isn’t compatible with older GeForce GTX 1000 series GPUs based on the “Pascal” architecture.

However, for those still utilizing Turing GPUs, the new solution appears to be quite straightforward and user-friendly.

The tool offers the option for automatic configuration or manual confirmation. It’s important to note that this modification entails patching the UEFI firmware on the motherboard, so understanding the associated risks is crucial.

Although this technology offers potential performance enhancements, there are cases where enabling BAR may result in no performance gains or even marginal losses in performance. Therefore, it’s essential to test whether the game you’re playing can effectively leverage Resizable BAR support, but for most modern titles on average enabling ReBAR should provide greater performance.

Due to NVIDIA’s reluctance to provide significant updates beyond security patches for end-of-life products, it’s unlikely they will officially offer ReBAR support for GTX 1000, GTX 1600 series, and RTX Turing GPUs.

However, all modern GPUs come with support, and platforms for Intel’s ARC graphics cards require ReBAR supported platforms. This solution remains the only available option to potentially marginally enhance gaming performance on your system, but I wouldn’t be surprised if NVIDIA themselves issue a driver update for Turing based graphics cards that quickly puts a stop to ReBarUEFI.