Question Balancing the power with pcie lanes.

[Alan Alan]

It seems the workstations with the most lanes are the true winners of the high speed era. Pcie Nvme drives grabbing lanes from graphics cards demanding X16 slots can be the turning point of optimization for home pc's. Sure, pcie gen 4, 5 and 6 are improvements but it still mainly boils down to more lanes. I see people complaining about game graphic studdering even after they get a top of the line graphics card with the quote "state of the art" nvme ssd's riding on the Pcie buss. How can this be, I spent all this money and seem to be getting nowhere. Lanes, Lanes, Lanes. If you don't have them your high speed pcie X16 graphics is suddenly reduced to X8 because you new Nvme just borrowed half of it's lanes. I gotta hand it to marketeers, Everything looks real good with pci express peripherals. That is, until you run out of lanes. Ain't it the truth?

 

[boju]

Not true. An example with 11th and 12th gen Intel there are 20 pcie lanes directly from cpu. 16 for single gpu and an nvme drive using 4 lanes when the top m2 slot is used. Additional pcie lanes from motherboard chipset if want more storage or peripheral devices which won't 'eat in to' cpu lanes unless you put something in second pcie slot (if applicable) and then pcie bandwidth is halved. So 20 lanes is enough for most cases and stuttering is result of something else entirely.

 

[Alan Alan]

Not true. An example with 11th and 12th gen Intel there are 20 pcie lanes directly from cpu. 16 for single gpu and an nvme drive using 4 lanes when the top m2 slot is used. Additional pcie lanes from motherboard chipset if want more storage or peripheral devices which won't 'eat in to' cpu lanes unless you put something in second pcie slot (if applicable) and then pcie bandwidth is halved. So 20 lanes is enough for most cases and stuttering is result of something else entirely.

I still think it's true unless we are talking apples and oranges. Take a look at what you said, you added lanes therefore it is still true that more lanes are the key. I knew right from the start there were limited lanes yet I figured X8 for graphics and X8 for two nvme cards would balance it out. However I used a raid configuration to prepare the data faster in preparation for the graphics accepting data on its X8 lane structure. So it evens itself out in a way and the raid 0 may have improved the storage speed. So I may have come out ahead in that aspect. However if I had 32 lanes on the cpu it would not have shared the 16 it does have. Lanes Lanes Lanes!!!
I'm not sure you are correct though about stuttering being something else entirely. Doesn't stuttering really translate to a lack of data being put into the graphics card. Seems the top of the line video card is useless for gamers when stuttering is such a distraction from excellent graphics. Without high speed storage and graphics due to a lack of lanes, aren't you bound to get stuttering? Of course ruling out all of the stupid stuff with interrupts and background apps that normally cause stuttering. Lanes are the key, yet it's always in the fine print. I only have an RTX 3070 and the Intel Coffee Lake in a Z370a board and it works fine. Stuttering is almost now existent and when it does it's usually very short bursts, probably from the storage in Raid 0 helping out there.

 

[boju]

Your situation is different knowing what board you have. Nvme drives on this generation motherboard run off chipset not from cpu. Unless you're running an expansion card for raiding? Then yes half pcie lanes from cpu is used if pcie slot is populated like having another graphic card installed. Otherwise if using onboard m2 slots then no pcie lanes is deducted from gpu. Running a gpu at 8x won't cause stutters. Background services, thermals, storage drive, ram, drivers etc can.

As for raiding ssds, well, direct storage might support it in future games, maybe. Other than that, won't really notice much if at all against a single nvme drive.