Along with the announcement of the Radeon RX 6900, Radeon RX 6800 XT and Radeon RX 6800 graphics cards late last year, AMD introduced Smart Access Memory technology. It allows the central processor to use the entire video memory array of the video card at once, and not to access only its part of up to 256 MB. Thanks to this, in some games, you can achieve performance gains of up to 16%.

At the time of the announcement, the technology required the user to have the latest Ryzen 5000 series processor, a Radeon RX 6000 series graphics card, and an AMD 500 series motherboard. Today, the company unveiled the Radeon RX 6700 XT graphics card, and at the same time announced that it is expanding support for Smart Access Memory to Ryzen 3000 series processors.

The user will still be required to have an AMD B550 or X570 motherboard, so owners of older AMD B450 and X470 chipsets are out of luck. Additionally, the Ryzen 5 3400G and Ryzen 3 3200G APUs are not supported by Smart Access Memory.

Unlike AMD’s latest series of Zen 3-based processors, Ryzen 3000 Zen 2-based models are readily available and often at a significant discount. The single-core performance of these processors is not as great as that of the new chips, but Smart Access Memory technology will help narrow the gap between them.  

To use Smart Access Memory, in addition to the Ryzen 3000 series processor and a motherboard based on the AMD 500 series chipset, the user will also need a Radeon RX 6000 series graphics card. Unfortunately, the latter component is very difficult to find on sale at an adequate price in the current reality.