Intel: PCI Express 4.0 Doesn't Matter for Gaming

Tsing

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If you're excited at the prospect of what PCIe 4.0 can do for gaming, don't be. That's according to Intel, which released new charts that attempt to prove why it is pointless for gamers.

The initial argument is that the most popular resolutions don't fully saturate the PCIe 3.0 x15 interface.

Intel then referenced benchmarks by TechPowerUp, which showed negligible performance gains between PCIe 3.0 x4 and PCIe 3.0 x16. The point is that PCIe 4.0 x16 would provide a similarly tiny improvement.

Intel has discovered that launching games and loading levels doesn’t even saturate the PCIe 3.0 x 4 interface. Intel looked at a handful of games using internal testing utilities and found that most games are hitting peak read speeds of under 500 MB/s during launch and level loads. DOOM for PC used over 2 GB/s, but that was still far below the capabilities of the Samsung SSD 970 PRO 1TB NVMe drive that they used for testing. It looks like PCIe Gen4 just isn’t going to matter for gamers.
 
Well of course that is what Intel would say when they don't have it, wait until they do and then it will be promoted as gaming bliss if one had it

For AMD it really opens up the chipset bandwidth and options for SSD's initially. Besides that? Not much for gaming in the end.
 
I am curious if we saturate the PCI-E 3.0 bus for GPU's. I feel like I read something a couple years ago showing a minute performance drop going from 16x to 8x, but that was a couple years ago.
It's a no brainier that it's a game changer for content providers like Netflix, AWS, the video game streaming services, big data, etc.
 
I read an article at TPU back in the fall when the first RTX's came out. They managed to show some bottle-necking with PCIe 2.0 @ 4k/60hz with a pair of 2080TI's in SLI using the new bridge. It was only just barely but it did happen. With PCIe 3.0 we're not really even close yet. Probably will take 8k/60hz or 120hz to hit that ceiling.

Here's the link to that article. https://www.techpowerup.com/review/nvidia-geforce-rtx-2080-ti-pci-express-scaling/

Edit: I should specify that it 2.0x16 or 3.0x8 was limit they were hitting. At 3.0x16 things were unaffected.

Worth a mentioning is that presently we don't have GPU's with PCIe 4.0 options yet so the most a card could saturate would be 4.0x8 or 3.0x16 and at the moment there isn't anything that can do that. I was surprised the NVMe's couldn't do it though.
 
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Kind of what I thought. I'll need to go back and read the press briefing from AMD, but I can't specifically recall the company stating 4.0 being a huge game changer for the gaming market.
 
I think its "future" proofing AMD has been big on that with AM4 and backwards compatibility.
 
How much longer can they utilize AM4 though? I thought I saw a slide that said they'd support it up to 2020, which was ambiguous as to whether it meant through this year or throughout all of 2020.
 
The nice thing about PCIe as a standard, as it has always kept well ahead of what we've needed for the most part regarding bandwidth. Back in the day, we were severely limited by ancient buses and interfaces that lived well past their useful life spans. ISA and PCI are examples of this. RS232 ports, and IEEE1394a were also examples of that.
 
Dan_D said:
The nice thing about PCIe as a standard, as it has always kept well ahead of what we've needed for the most part regarding bandwidth. Back in the day, we were severely limited by ancient buses and interfaces that lived well past their useful life spans. ISA and PCI are examples of this. RS232 ports, and IEEE1394a were also examples of that.
Click to expand...

RS232 is still highly used in industrial because it's a rugged plug and no license fees. Some things are just now coming in with USB-B for HMI access.
 
alxlwson said:
RS232 is still highly used in industrial because it's a rugged plug and no license fees. Some things are just now coming in with USB-B for HMI access.
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It's slow as ****. It's needed replacement for close to two decades. I understand why its still prevalent in many industries. However, I don't have to like it. :)
 
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Dan_D said:
It's slow as ****. It's needed replacement for close to two decades. I understand why its still prevalent in many industries. However, I don't have to like it. :)
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I agree 100%. I find it funny that I program PLC's and VFD's and watch live data over it.
 
alxlwson said:
RS232 is still highly used in industrial because it's a rugged plug and no license fees
Click to expand...
I'm always amazed when I see it on something still. I remember configuring printers using it on my Atari 400 add on interface adapter back in 1982.
 
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