Looking for someone with expertise in PCI-E 4, 5, and 6?
Looking for someone with expertise in PCI-E 4, 5, and 6?
Linus brought up PCI-E 5.0 unexpectedly, which surprised me since I’m only now considering 4.0 boards and haven’t seen any Intel chips beyond 3.0. I discovered that even 6.0 is just a few years away. That article I read compared 5.0 and 6.0 to excessive features, noting how quickly standards evolve—almost doubling every two years (about every six months). If these speeds hit the market tomorrow, they’d feel like overkill, right? Could GPU and SSD makers quickly adopt these fast interfaces? Or are these speeds really unnecessary (overkill)?
SSD yes, but the real world uses may be questionable, speed wise. the bandwidth may be useful for some prosumers and enterprise environment though. but it does allow you to split lesser lanes to each device and be able to plug in more devices and still keep the same speed as lower gen pcie, so that's always a plus for GPU, it depends on what workload some require close to no bandwidth while some is very bandwidth heavy some task may saturate pcie 3.0 x16, while some dont even saturate pcie 1.0 x1 as for games, we're seeing pcie 3.0 x8 being saturated slightly for current gen, the newer cards might use more bandwidth, especially if RTX IO is implemented.
GPUs are already pushing the limits of PCIe 2.0 bandwidth. Even with PCIe 3.0 and four GPUs operating in x4 mode, performance drops only slightly (around 5-10%). Future versions like PCIe 4.0 will handle this demand easily. Devices that benefit from such high speeds include NVMe drives, network cards, and FPGAs. Many of these components often communicate via the same PCIe bus, resulting in heavy traffic. Because of this need, additional protocols like NVLink, RapidIO, CXL, and OpenCAPI have been developed to increase throughput. These solutions are usually unnecessary for typical home users, making them more suited for advanced setups rather than everyday computing.
The 2080Ti performance has been demonstrated by both HardwareUnboxed and I think GN, indicating that PCIe 3.0 x16 might sometimes offer an advantage over PCIe 3.0 x8 in certain games. As higher-end GPUs become available, this difference is expected to grow further in the coming years.
However, the claim remains inaccurate even for 2080Ti or higher. At those speeds, PCIE3.0 x16 does slightly restrict performance, meaning it will only get worse with GPUs that have greater capacity, especially in certain titles. Those aiming for a 3080 or better should expect improvement only with PCIE4 x16.
So what they demonstrated is that PCIe 3.0 x8 limits performance by a small margin. Switching to PCIe 4.0 resolves this because it doubles the bandwidth. Additionally, NVIDIA has stated there’s no immediate need to upgrade to PCIe 4.0. For achieving the highest FPS, using a CPU compatible with PCIe 3.0 is sufficient since PCIe 4.0 won’t significantly boost frame rates at present.