Will next gen GPUs saturate pcie 2.0 x16 or x8 lanes?

[mc_conor]

I'm just wondering because i realised that my p8p67 pro mobo supports ivy. But i don't think it supports pci e 3.0 or if it does it's just on one card; see here:

http://event.asus.com/2011/mb/PCIe3_Ready/

It seems 2 560 ti's in sli start to saturate pci 2.0 x 8 lanes, only slightly.

So i presume next gen cards should saturate pcie 2.0 x 16, the high end ones at least?


Any thoughts?.....I'm not sure and i know it's a while away yet I'm just curious.

 

[beenthere]

No it's highly unlikely that next gen of new Vid cards will come anywhere close saturating an X16 2.0 PCIe slot as they can barely saturate an X8 socket now. The PCIe 3.0 spec is a marketing ploy right now as it won't be needed for a long time.

 

[mc_conor]

I suppose that's true. Probably required in 2 generations then? The generation after the 600 NVIDIA and 7000 AMD?

 

[trihedral]

They probably will use 2.0, If they use 3.0 it would probably still work for the 2.0. If you have 2.0 it should still work fine since even 6990's don't fully occupy the bandwith of the 2.0's (500MB).

You won't have to worry, if anything it's only off by 5%, unless once they release the cards they introduce something more beneficial associated with the 3.0 cards.

 

[Guest]

No it's highly unlikely that next gen of new Vid cards will come anywhere close saturating an X16 2.0 PCIe slot as they can barely saturate an X8 socket now. The PCIe 3.0 spec is a marketing ploy right now as it won't be needed for a long time.

The additional power from the 3.0 slot means you can probably run a GTX 580 without external power connectors. The amount of data being sent to the GPU is not going to increase drastically. The bandwidth is required internall in the GPU.

 

[manofchalk]

Graphics cards aren't going to need more than PCIe-2 8x for a long while I think.

The main reason PCIe-3 exists is a future proofing measure to pave the way for PCIe based SSD's and storage solutions (think RAID cards). Its already becoming somewhat relevant to the normal consumer, SSD's are already maxing out SATAIII and now there are calls for a SATA Express interface, which is basically just a PCI-e lane with a SATA port on the end.

The max amount of power delivered through the PCI-e slot is 75W, and that hasnt changed between the revisions.