PCIe Scaling Results: 3DMark And Crysis
A pure synthetic benchmark, 3DMark’s results often reflect computational power more effectively than other things, such as memory bandwidth and response time, which can often affect actual games.
There doesn’t appear to be much performance difference between x8 and x16 slots, though the X58’s PCIe 2.0 x4 slot certainly outperforms the P55’s 2.5 GT/s version.
All of the performance differences found in 3DMark’s system score can also be seen in its GPU score.
As an unbearably difficult-to-render game that few people actually play, Crysis is the real-world benchmark that fills the gap between more popular games and pure synthetics. Like 3DMark, it shows only minor losses going from x16 to x8 mode while giving the X58’s 5.0 GT/s x4 link a huge lead over the P55’s 2.5 GT/s version.
Activating anti-aliasing (AA) makes the difference between slot bandwidth even more visible, but just as noticeable is the fact that none of these settings play smoothly, even with an ultra-fast Radeon HD 5870 graphics card and a 4.0 GHz Core i7 CPU.
