Hello David
A BGP router can inform its neighbors of its route refresh capability by including the “Route Refresh Capability” optional parameter in the OPEN message when establishing a BGP session with the neighbor. The OPEN message is the first message sent by a BGP router to its neighbor when establishing a BGP session, and it contains various parameters that are used to negotiate the BGP session. If the “Route Refresh Capability” optional parameter is included in the OPEN message, it indicates to the neighbor that the router supports the route refresh capability.
If the soft-reconfiguration feature is not configured on your router, and your neighbor does not support route refresh, then yes, only a hard reset will update your BGP table.
I hope this has been helpful!
Laz