AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT Smart Access Memory (SAM) Review

Overview

The raw performance of the new AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT has already impressed us. In our feature review, which you can read here, it battled with the Nvidia RTX 3080 and even the RTX 3090, beating both of the flagship Nvidia cards in multiple tests and traded blows in the rest. It seems them, AMD are truly back on form and keep in mind, the RX 6800 XT is not their flagship card, it’s just the one we got for review.

With SAM enabled, we certainly got mixed results, but I’d say AMD’s claims are completely true overall. There’s a clear line though, with games like Metro Exodus, Deus Ex, and Final Fantasy for example, which are Nvidia optimised and faired slightly worse with SAM enabled.

Should I Enable SAM?

Honestly, the few times we lost performance is was by a pretty small margin and in fewer games than we gained performance in. The gains in some titles were pretty clear, taking already record breaking scores and giving them a little boost.

We benchmarked the GPU for our review on the 3900X, then again with the 5900X for this feature, then once more with the 5900X and SAM enabled. Obviously the upgrade in CPU alone gave a huge boost to many tests.

It seemed to benefit 1440p the most though, as 1080p is more CPU bound and 4K is more GPU bound limiting the performance increases. A couple of games dropped a few percent, many stayed basically the same, and a good few increased in performance at multiple resolutions. Overall, I’d say you’ve more to gain from having it enabled than not.

Final Thoughts

It seems like the technology is working rather well. It’s clear there’s room for improvements. However, now that the hardware is there, developers can take advantage of it. We know Nvidia and Intel are working on similar technologies, but overall, it seems like all gamers will benefit from what’s little more than a single setting in your BIOS. Fantastic!