A modder has found a clever way to fool your PC into enabling resizable BAR on Nvidia GPUs that don’t officially support the frame rate boosting tech. If you have a graphics card based on Nvidia’s Turing architecture, which powers the RTX 2000 and GTX 1600 series, then you can now enjoy the benefits of resizable BAR on your rig, although there’s a level of risk involved in the process of enabling it.
Resizable BAR is supported by all the current best graphics card options, after AMD included it in the feature set of its Radeon RX 6000 series of GPUs, when it was called Smart Access Memory. It’s since been adopted by Nvidia and Intel, and is a crucial feature for GPUs made by the latter. For more information, make sure you read our full guide on how to enable resizable BAR, where we explain how it works and show you how to enable it on supporting hardware.
We’ve seen some good benefits from enabling resizable BAR, including a big bump in the frame rate in some of the Assassin’s Creed games, although the benefits in some games are minimal. However, enabling it requires both your motherboard and your graphics card to support it. The former isn’t much of a problem now, with even some old Intel Coffee Lake and AMD X370 Ryzen motherboards offering support with the latest BIOS updates.
However, resizable BAR isn’t officially supported by older Nvidia GPUs, and enabling it requires a digital signature from the GPU. That’s what this tweak aims to fix, by effectively fooling your motherboard’s BIOS/EFI unto thinking the GPU supports resizable BAR. It’s based on the existing ReBarUEFI custom UEFI DXE driver, which enables you to tweak the BIOS firmware on older motherboards to forcer them to support resizable BAR, and takes it one step further to get it working on Nvidia Turing GPUs.
Sadly, it doesn’t work with GPUs based on the Pascal architecture (the GTX 1000 series), but it does appear to work with Turing GPUs, which include RTX 2000 series GPUs such as the RTX 2070 with ray tracing and support and Tensor cores, as well as the cheaper GTX 1600 series, such as the GTX 1660, which only support standard rasterization rendering in games.
Created by Github user terminatorul, and spotted by wccftech, the new UEFI DXE driver is called NvStrapsReBar, and it requires you to make a copy of your motherboard’s latest BIOS/EFI, and then tweak it before reflashing it. You can find all the instructions to get it working on the Github page, but bear in mind that there’s always a level of risk of bricking your motherboard if you play with its firmware, particularly if your motherboard doesn’t have a dual BIOS system.
If your GPU is getting a bit long in the tooth now, then make sure you also check out our Nvidia RTX 4070 Super review, where we put Nvidia’s latest mid-range GPU through its paces.