AMD Says Not All NVMe SSDs Support SmartAccess Storage Technology

IT House May 29 news, at the recently held Computex 2022 computer show, AMD launched SmartAccess Storage (SAS) storage intelligence technology.

AMD says it combines existing SAM memory outsmarting technology with Microsoft’s DirectStorage technology, by decompressing data from memory directly onto the GPU, rather than relaying it through the CPU. These will drastically reduce game load times compared to traditional Win32 storage APIs.

Details on how AMD merged the two technologies were not provided in the Computex keynote. However, in a recent interview with PCWorld, Frank Azor, AMD’s Chief Architect for Gaming Solutions and Marketing, detailed the story of how AMD Smart Access Memory works with DirectStorage to give rise to SmartAccess Storage.

When asked about SAS’ minimum specification requirements, Azor revealed that not all NVMe PCIe drives will be certified for the technology, and that eligible drives must meet certain performance requirements set by AMD, even for the latest PCIe 5.0 SSDs.

Therefore, we have a list of authorized suppliers of the parts we are currently developing in relation to NVMe drives and controllers to meet our performance requirements for SmartAccess storage. If you happen to have a PCIe Gen4 or upcoming PCIe 5 drive… that doesn’t mean those drives will be able to keep up with the performance requirements and capabilities of SmartAccess storage.

SAS’ underlying technologies, such as DirectStorage, have no such requirement. As required by Microsoft, any NVMe drive (PCIe Gen3 or newer) and a shader 6.0 GPU in DirectX12-ready configuration are necessary.

According to Azor, Smart Access Storage is basically a variation of the PCIe Resizable Bar that uses the graphics card’s entire VRAM memory buffer for DirectStorage and data decompression. Without Smart Access Storage, it means that the graphics card has only 256MB of VRAM to address and transfer.

In theory, this should make SmartAccess Storage significantly faster than DirectStorage, but it also means that not all Radeon GPUs support SmartAccess Storage technology.

IT House understands that Nvidia has previously applied similar RTX IO technology, but has not yet determined whether RTX IO uses PCIe Resizable BAR.