The Nvidia GTX 16 and RTX 20 series GPUs can 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 at the beginning of the decade as AMD's Smart Access Memory feature, which modifies PCIe's Resizable BAR to remove certain limitations on the memory front and increase performance by a decent chunk on some games (we'll see). let's get back to that).
Nvidia and Intel also adopted ReBAR, but in the case of Team Green, support was only offered with RTX 3000 graphics cards, and the previous generation products at the time were left out.
Enter the new invention from developer 'Terminatorul': a UEFI driver that allows ReBAR to work with older GTX 1600 and RTX 2000 graphics cards.
As Tom's Hardware reports, the tool in question is called NvStrapsReBar and it patches your motherboard's UEFI firmware so you can configure the size of the resizable BAR to achieve slightly faster frame rates with these GPUs.
As good as this idea seems in principle, there are some major drawbacks here, meaning it's best left alone for most people, and we'll explore this below.
Analysis: risk versus reward
The task of patching your motherboard this way is not without risk, and if something goes wrong, it could be very bad news for your PC (we're talking about locking territory). Since this is an unofficial hack for ReBAR support, we don't really recommend trying it unless you are very tech-savvy and confident in what you are doing.
Even then, we advise against it, because with relatively old Nvidia GPUs like these models, the gains ReBAR will provide will likely be slim. While SAM for AMD GPUs ushered in some considerable frame rate increases in some In PC gaming, in this particular scenario, you're probably looking at minor or not much gains (a small percentage of extra frames per second).
Yes, you might get a touch more with certain games, but it will be a bit of a lottery; Likewise, you won't see any improvement at all, or maybe even a slight negative impact. In our opinion, there are too many unknowns and an unbalanced risk-reward balance in going down this path, given the potential dangers of a major hardware failure as mentioned.
Still, the option is there for those who want to take it, and having more options is never a bad thing.
