NVIDIA RTX 30 Series Resizable BAR Support Continues Helping Performance On Linux

Written by Michael Larabel in Display Drivers on 14 September 2021 at 09:09 AM EDT. Page 1 of 3. 10 Comments.

While NVIDIA has been supporting Resizable BAR for a while now with their GeForce RTX 30 series graphics cards, for those exclusively using Linux it remains more of a challenge due to AIB partners generally not releasing any vBIOS updates for ReBAR support that can be easily applied under Linux. But if you do carry out an update -- such as under Windows -- the performance uplift can be worthwhile if using a game that can benefit from the support.

A few months back we looked at the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Resizable BAR support on Linux. In this article is a current look at the Resizable BAR impact with several more RTX 30 series cards having an updated vBIOS and tested under Linux when enabling the Resizable BAR support for the system.

Unfortunately for those exclusively using Linux, there isn't much in the way of public vBIOS software updates. While NVIDIA does support applying video BIOS updates under Linux and has made the necessary software available to their AIB partners, they themselves aren't releasing any of these Linux binary vBIOS updates direct to consumers. As of writing I haven't seen any NVIDIA board partners release Linux binaries making for easy-to-apply video BIOS updates, so it's basically left up to using Windows for updating your RTX 30 series vBIOS at this time if wanting to make it ReBAR-compatible. Under Windows it's quite easy to install an updated video BIOS for your graphics card without any fuss.

NVIDIA Resizable BAR GeForce RTX 30 Series Benchmarks

For those wondering about the performance benefit for Linux gamers in doing so, here are some comparison tests with the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti, RTX 3070, and RTX 3090 graphics cards with ReBAR on/off while testing on an AMD Ryzen 9 5900X system with its latest system BIOS as of testing. The NVIDIA 470.63.01 driver was in use.


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