Resizeable BAR mod for older gaming PCs, said to deliver up to 12% more performance, could breath a little more life into systems as old as Sandy Bridge

A stylised image displaying the nature of memory transactions between system RAM and VRAM.

For games to use a graphics card for rendering all the nice visuals, one of the countless steps involved is mapping the contents of the VRAM to the system memory. For many years, this was limited to a maximum of 256MB, until Resizable BAR was heavily promoted by AMD. This feature of the PCI Express connection allowed the mapping to be much larger, helping to reduce the number of transactions and whatnot. The only problem was that despite the feature being years old, earlier motherboards never offered it. Well not anymore, thanks to a clever BIOS mod that will enable ReBAR on PCs from as far back as 2011.

The project, titled ReBarUEFI by GitHub user xCuri0 (via HKEPC), is a tad on the complicated side and I'm not going to pretend that I know exactly what the mod is doing to a motherboard's BIOS to enable the Resizable BAR function. However, Intel first introduced the feature, as part of the PCI Express specification, over 13 years ago but it took a long time before any motherboard vendors paid attention to it.