Max PCIe bandwidth utilised

[shishir]

What is the maximum PCIe bandwidth utilized by the best performing GPU i.e. ATI Radeon 5970 in x16? Because in x16, the maximum bandwidth available is 8GBps and there is not a considerable performance loss in x8 or x4. This I am also asking to ascertain whether PCIe 3.0 is gonna used in coming year or PCIe 2.1 will handle GPUs for next few years?

 

[jay2tall]

I am not sure exactly how much bandwidth it DOES use because each application is different. I've seen many tests with other cards in x16, x8, x4 setups and certain games show no difference, while others show a pretty considerable difference. Most cases the large differences are between the x4 and x8. However, x16 usually does show a slight boost over x8. But like I said, this was not with a 5970 that has 2 GPU's. You can safely assume that a 5970 will not need more than a PCI-E 2.0 x16 slot. I do think in the future cards will utilize more bandwidth once the PCI-E 3.0 standard is more prevalent, but it will be quite some time. Look at how long it took cards to max out the PCI-E 1 x16 standard after 2.0 was introduced? I wouldn't be to concerned.

 

[shishir]

Best answer selected by shishir.