 AMD has certainly enjoyed the high ground for some time now, but is it over? MSI doesn't think so, which is why they've sponsored today's video giving us a sneak peek at something really exciting. Take a look at this! The GE76 Raider. Big deal, you might say. Sure, it comes in a cool etched Tiamat edition, but at the end of the day, isn't it just yet another Intel Nvidia laptop? No, no! This one is different. This laptop supports resizable bar like AMD does with their smart access memory. That means that this Intel CPU can access all of this Nvidia GPU's memory at once, just like a Ryzen and Radeon pairing can. Could this be what Intel needs to fight back against AMD? I mean, honestly speaking, I doubt that MSI really gives a flying d***. They're playing it both ways anyway, but this back and forth can only mean more laptops flying off the shelves to consumers, so I guess that's why they're raining marketing funds into this fiery showdown. Just so we're clear, this is not a review. We're only testing this machine today in an on versus off configuration, but we should still get to know it a little better so that you guys know what to expect and so MSI doesn't get mad at us. It's got a 17.3 inch 300 Hertz IPS display that should keep our RTX 3080 Max-P busy, despite its 1080p resolution. Under the hood, ours has a Core i7-10870H, 32 gigs of DDR4 3200 MHz RAM, and a 1TB NVMe SSD in one of two M.2 slots. It's got a beefy 5-heat pipe cooler for the CPU and GPU that MSI calls their Cooler Boost 5, and feeding the beast is a 280 watt power brick and the 99.9 watt-hour battery that's, let's be honest, is essential if you're gonna run this thing off the wall, especially in the extreme performance mode in Dragon Center. In order to toggle resizable bar on and off, we're gonna use an Nvidia driver that supports it and one that doesn't. Simple. Unlike these results. Shadow of the Tomb Raider in traditional rendering mode actually got slower with resizable bar enabled and was identical when we turned on ray traced shadows. Wolfenstein Youngblood at least picks up a couple of frames at minimum, but nothing big, and again has little to boast about when ray tracing is enabled. F1 2020 is a title that saw a significant performance uplift with smart access memory in our Radeon 6800 review, but it loses a few minimum frames with resizable bar enabled here, while Flight Simulator 2020 does gain a frame or two, but just a frame or two. Finally, CSGO, a big winner for smart access memory on AMD, sees, well, a tangible increase in minimum frame rates and not much else. For fun, we ran 3DMark to see if a synthetic test might show us more of a difference, but it was within half a percent either way. When we move to Blender, we're once again looking at minimal differences to the point where it's tough to say that there's any real difference here at all. It's a second faster in CUDA BMW, but then a second slower in Optics Classroom, and LuxMark has resizable bar losing by about 2% across the board. So does Photoshop, with DaVinci Resolve and Premiere coming within a single percentage point of difference. Specview Perf 2020 again gives us some brutal numbers, like we're not far off, but across the board it's on par or slower than the traditional driver, save for Katia, where it went up a single point. This all lends a fair bit of credence to AMD's claim that smart access memory is more than simply enabling resizable bar support, and Nvidia's confidence that they could match AMD's performance improvements simply haven't materialized here. So does resizable bar on Intel and Nvidia close the gap? No, not yet. You're probably sitting there thinking, this is kind of a weird sponsored video experience so far, showing off this crazy ballin' sexy gaming monstrosity by highlighting how one of its key features makes no difference at all. But wait, there's far more to this story. We reached out to MSI with our results and they said, I'm paraphrasing a little bit here, well what are you, some kind of an idiot? This is an early tech preview, it's only validated under specific circumstances, because the ladies and gents in the lab still have a lot of work to do, ya dunce. Oh you guys. The good news is that we found one of those cases where resizable bar makes a difference for Intel and Nvidia today, in Assassin's Creed Valhalla. Now because we only have one data point, and because we don't have an RDNA 2 mobile GPU yet, we decided to throw together a desktop GPU bench with an RX 6800 XT to inform our guesses as to what the performance differences might look like between Team Red and Team Blueish Green in the future. As it turns out, Team Red's still got an advantage off of the starting line compared to Nvidia, with roughly double the performance gain across the board. That's still a significant departure though from the rest of our results today, and it looks like these improvements scale proportionally with the amount of additional power draw that we observed. This shows that not only is there a lot of room for performance to grow from here, for laptop manufacturers like MSI, there's also an additional benefit. Being able to increase core utilization and keep the CPU working to feed the GPU means that you could actually maintain higher performance than you otherwise might in a thermally constrained chassis. And would you look at that. This actually bears out when we try testing the GE76 Raider in silent mode, where the cooling system is limited for acoustics, and the CPU throttles clock speeds more aggressively. Not only do we get better frame times with resizable bar enabled, we're getting them at a smaller increase in power consumption. So in the future, you might expect smaller laptops to pack a bigger punch thanks to resizable bar. And as for the big ones, well, they'll just get better still. Like our new underwear designs at lttstore.com. Oh, those are the old ones, doesn't matter. The point is, speaking of lttstore, make sure you get subscribed because, yes, I do know about the counterfeit ltt merch out there. And I'm gonna have a video coming about it very soon. Back on topic though. These performance results leave us with some questions. Like, what does resizable bar even do to get these kinds of results? And why did it take so long to get here? Resizable bar is the official PCI SIG term for what AMD brands smart access memory, which allows a CPU to communicate with all of a PCI express device's memory at once, instead of in smaller 256 meg chunks, which is a big deal because that is one 64th the size of the frame buffer in the RTX 3080 in our GE76 Raider. While AMD only officially support smart access memory on their 500 series chipsets, MSI has been in the news for having enabled resizable bar not only on 400 series AMD motherboards, but on Intel motherboards as old as their 300 series, which means that owners of CPUs as old as eighth gen core can get in on the action too. Now this has been an optional part of the PCI express specification in some form since at least around 2008, but it's never really been thought of as a desktop technology. It makes sense. I mean, resizable bar probably wouldn't have even made much of a difference even a couple of years ago where on average, CPU thread counts weren't as high and GPUs weren't shipping with tens of gigabytes of memory. But when AMD moved first with their smart access memory for their Radeon 6000 series, the industry took notice. As the kids say, it's free real estate. And AMD's platform took advantage of it out of the gate, at least for some games, giving them a head start. This left Intel and Nvidia scrambling to validate and enable a feature that they were always able to turn on, but hadn't planned to introduce yet, which is where the GE76 Raider came in. While it might look like just another gaming laptop, it's got that RGB, right? It's going to be among the first with resizable bar support for its 10th gen core i7 and RTX 3080 Max-P, once the official drivers land. And as we've seen, RTX 3080's mobile performance can be very good. So chances are it'll only get better as performance gains like we saw today start showing up in more titles and getting embiggened. And chances are that I'm going to tell you a little more about our sponsor MSI here in the sponsorship portion of the video. The GE76 Raider is their first gaming laptop that's equipped with Wi-Fi 6E. It uses a refined chassis with their customizable light bar, it's got up to an Intel Core i9 processor and RTX 3080 Max-P. It features their dual wave speakers and woofer with a full HD webcam. And of course, Intel Plus NVIDIA resizable bar technology for smoothing out your gaming experience. You can check it out at the link below and ancient Babylonian goddesses have never looked so good. Does anyone know how to read like cuneiform? If you guys are looking for another video to watch, maybe check out our deeper look at smart access memory. We're going to have that links down below.