Resizable Bar Benchmarks

[Naz]

Resizable bar is a recent performance feature, available with current generation hardware first with AMD and then Nvidia and Intel. Up until now the CPU accessed the GPUs memory in 256MB chunks. Resizable bar allows the CPU to access the entire GPU's frame buffer at once, potentially improving performance. Titles that currently have this feature enabled can get a modest, up to* +12% uplift. You need 3 specific pieces of hardware to enable it. Also if you have a supported GPU it may need a firmware update as well as a motherboard bios update.

Supported Hardware

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1. Supported CPU	2. Supported Motherboard	3. Supported GPUs
AMD: Ryzen 3000 or 5000	AMD Motherboard chipset: 500 series or 400 series	AMD: RX 6000 Series
Intel: 10th or 11th Gen	Z490, H410, H470, B460 and others that support 11th gen CPUs	Nvidia: RTX 3000 series

 

 

My Other 7DTD Benchmarks

 

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Alpha 20
A20.0 2 systems benchmarks
Alpha 19

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A19.3>A19.4>A19.5 Hotbox Benchmarks

Resizable Bar Trident Benchmarks

A19 RTX 3090 Trident Benchmarks

A19.2 B3 Hotbox Benchmarks

A19.0 Benchmarks 2 Systems Intel,AMD,SLI,Core Count And SMT Tested

A15 Trident Benchmarks 

 

 

Currently the feature will only be enabled in select titles because enabling it in some games can make performance worse. However it's possible to enable it for any game using Nvidia Profile Inspector, which is what I've done here.

 

 

Benchmark Notes & Disclaimers

 

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1. These figures should be taken as ball park figures and not absolute values.
7DTD is a very difficult game to benchmark accurately. It's in alpha and sometimes does weird things. Also some things are difficult to account for such as the AI, they will behave differently and spawn differently every run, which leads to #2.

2. What's controlled for and what's not
I haven't controlled for driver versions & windows versions. My goal was just to get "close enough" results instead of 100% accurate as possible. That said i have controlled for memory leaks, restarting the game after every run. Time of day is reset from the console after every run. When changing resolution i changed ingame before shutting down then validated with the unity screen selector on next launch. Background programs were running for the tests but assigned to cores not used by 7DTD. No zombies/animals where killed so areas weren't "cleared" until x amount of days, to insure that on following runs they would respawn (Although i can't do much if zombies kill animals or vise versa etc). I only did 1 pass on each test, however any result that didn't look right or didn't make sense was discarded and retested.

 

3. 1 system isn't enough to draw definitive conclusions for every configuration. The conclusions found here may or may not apply to your own systems, these results are only really comparable if you have similar hardware. But they will however give an idea of where the current performance is at with the hardware that was tested.

 

4. It's Alpha

Any update could change any conclusions drawn from these tests. Also as a work in progress things are always improving and getting worse, by the time 7DTD goes gold these results with be obsolete and invalid. Things are always changing in alpha.

 

5. Console Options used
all tests are run with increased view distance (sg optionsgfxviewdistance 12). 

6. Tests on different resolutions were done on monitors native aspect ratio
16:9 Resolutions were tested on an Asus PB287Q 4K 3840x2160 60HZ Monitor
21:9 Resolution was tested on an LG 38GL950G 3840x1600 175Hz Monitor

 

7. The benchmark Run
I've been using the same run since A14 for all tests, you can find more details on the exact run in my a15 benchmarks i did ages ago Here

 

 

System Tested

 

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Trident

CPU	AMD R9 3950x
Motherboard	Gigabyte X570 Aorus Xtreme
Ram	G.SKILL Trident Z Neo 64GB (4 x 16GB) DDR4 3600Mhz CL16-19-19-39
Storage 1 Save Data	1TB Sabrent Rocket NVMe PCIe 4 M.2 SSD
Storage 2 Game Data	2TB Sabrent Rocket NVMe PCIe 4 M.2 SSD
GPU	MSI Suprim X RTX 3090 24GB (With EVGA Firmware)

 

 

 

 

System Overclock Notes

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[Gaming Profile V2]

CPU: Vcore: 1.45V
CCD 0: CCX 0: 45.50 
CCD 0: CCX 1: 44.50 
CCD1 DISABLED

SMT: Disabled

Ram: Stock: Default JEDEC(2133Mhz) , Overclock: XMP Enabled (3600Mhz)    
GPU Core:+160 Mem:+550      
GPU Bios Flashed with a 500 Watt Power Target

 

 

Tested With 2 Video Settings

 

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Ultra Settings 1

Ultra Settings 2

Lower Settings 1

Lower Settings 2

 

 

Trident Benchmarks

I just did 1 profile for these tests to save time using G Profile V2. Custom profiles for games usually get reset to default after a driver update which indeed happened in the middle of the tests, but the RSB enabled profile was re-applied after the update and before further tests. So RSB should be enabled for all tests here. I also did the tests in A19.0 just because i already had the numbers with RSB disabled, cuz i'm lazy 😛 But i did do a 4k test in A19.5 for both settings just to be sure there hasn't been a recent addition that might benefit RSB.

 

Original Benchmark Excel Files: Download

 

A19.0 B180 Ultra Settings

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A19.0 B180 Lower Settings

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Conclusions

So that was not great. Overall it's within run to run variance. However it's consistently an improvement, so that does suggest it does indeed make things better overall. Anything bellow 1% is almost certainly margin of error, so if it does actually provide a boost in 7dtd it's bellow 1%. I checked and re-checked to make sure that both RSB was enabled at a hardware level and the required bits in profile inspector were applied and indeed they were. So this means 1 of 2 things, 1. There is some other factor in play that does not enable Resizable bar in 7dtd or 2. Resizable bar just won't have any meaningful benefit in 7dtd. I even tried setting a custom resolution on my 4k monitor to run 7DTD at 8k to put more strain on the GPU's frame buffer. Even then consuming 16 and half gigs of vram there wasn't really any difference.

If you want to try it yourself i'll leave the profile HERE but please run some before and after benchmarks to see if makes any difference on your machine, since the tests I've done show no real difference.

Edited January 10, 2022 by Naz (see edit history)

[Star69]

I put the question to Fatal in another thread and he said it must be implemented by Unity, not The Fun Pimps. So unless Unity takes an interest, it won’t happen for 7 Days. I have it enabled on my rig but was surprised how few games there are out there that utilize resizable bar.

[Naz]

It's a driver feature, the reason it's limited to certain titles currently is Nvidia only enables the feature on whitelisted titles, because it can cause worse performance in some games. So Nvidia only add games they've tested and found it benifits performance in them. 

 

However you can enable it for any game using profile inspector, the same tool used to enable features like sli in games that don't officially support it. 

 

https://www.google.com/amp/s/wccftech.com/heres-how-you-can-enable-resizable-bar-support-in-any-game-via-nvidia-inspector/amp/

 

I suspect the reason it doesn't seem to do anything in 7dtd is 7dtd uses very small textures. Most of the textures in the game are 2d and have file sizes of a couple hundred KB. Even high quality textures like the draw bridge are only about 13MB. So the current 256MB windows the cpu sees the frame buffer in is large enough already. 

Edited June 24, 2021 by Naz (see edit history)