Question PCIe 3.0? 4.0? 5.0? Why is this seldom mentioned?

[Poogers]

The main peripheral bus supported at the CPU/chipset level might be considered somewhat important but is rarely mentioned by commentators/evaluators/Intel. Any chance PCIe 5.0 will be supported in any of these given it reached Ver .9 as of Jan 17, 2019? https://www.tomshardware.com/news/pcie-4.0-5.0-pci-sig-specification,38460.html

 

[Math Geek]

what are you hoping will be said about it? overall, it's not that important. gpu's don't even come close to saturating the bandwidth and the fastest storage is barely able to tax x4 pcie 3.0 lanes.

so what important aspect of it are people missing when talking about ___? (not even sure what commentators you hope would talk about it, in reference to what?)

pcie 4.0 is supposed to be supported with new ryzen and new mobo's for it. but really doubling bandwidth for something that is fast enough already is not exactly exciting news....

 

[Poogers]

Sorry, that is my first post here and I thought it would appear attached to the article I was reading which was Intel's die/chipset roadmap:

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-7nm-10nm-investor-process,39298.html

Anyway, I'm interested in graphics file rendering not video games. One 3.4GB M.2 SSD can fill two lanes on the PCIe 4.0 spec (both at their theoretical speeds so I'm calling that a wash), so 2 or more similar SSDs operating simultaneously with a x4 graphics card will start to matter when rendering large output files from large input files, a process that can take hours rather than minutes to complete. Simultaneous CPU access, graphics access, RAM access, program code access and multiple large data file read/write access across multiple storage devices depends both on how you apply your drives (I have one SSD for data files one for the OS and one for programs) and the number of lanes required by the various processes. PCIe 4.0 would certainly be helpful but I would wait a short time for 5.0

 

[InvalidError]

You aren't going to need 3GB/s for typical video editing and 3D rendering any time soon. Processing is the main bottleneck in most of those tasks, not storage.

People aren't talking about PCIe 4.0/5.0 much because there aren't any consumer products for 4.0 yet and 5.0 currently does not exist beyond prototypes which we aren't going to be seeing in the mainstream for a couple more years. As Math wrote, it is only a bandwidth increase on something that is already fast enough for ~99% of people, not particularly exciting outside the datacenter.

Also, you aren't going to reduce a rendering tasks from "hours" to "minutes" by merely doubling PCIe bandwidth. If you had infinite processing power, you'd be looking at halving rendering time at best. Under most cases though, you will be CPU/GPU-bound even on a plain old SATA3 SSD.

 

[Poogers]

First of all I'd take a reduction of 1/2 the current render time any day whatever the current system choke point. I use mostly 4k M2TS sports videos and they are ridiculous to work with at about 1GB per minute. Compiling a 60 minute annotated composite file of various smaller 4k clips is challenging for all aspects of the machine, all of which I'd be replacing including board, CPU, GPU, memory, spinning archive disks, SSDs and so on. Wanting an interconnect bus that is as fast as possible on the motherboard is only sensible in the overall investment since it's a low cost component and might not be much of a wait (though you suspect not, possibly for good reason). Anyway, regardless of the merits or lack of in this analysis, it would be great if the nice people from Intel or elsewhere might mention which PCIe bus is being deployed in any chipset they are discussing.

 

[Math Geek]

it's also possible they do not mention them since right now everything is using pcie 3.0. been out so long even last few gen stuff used it. when pcie 4.0 comes out and we have a mix on the market, you will indeed see it specified. once pcie 4.0 is the norm and nothing is being made with 3.0 anymore, they'll stop mentioning it again. and so on.

that's my guess as to why it's not explicitly said right now. it's just the only thing being used so by default we all know that's what is there. we do talk about cpu connected lanes and how lanes are split up for various features and such and quite a lot really. but it's a given right now that we're talking about 3.0 lanes.


oh and here is the link for the comments on that particular article if you wish to jump in there

PCIe 5.0 Ready For Prime Time

PCI-SIG announced that it ratified Version 0.9 of the PCI Express 5.0 specification, signaling that end devices will come to market soon. PCIe 5.0 Ready For Prime Time : Read more

forums.tomshardware.com

 

[geofelt]

It is seldom mentioned because, today, it makes little difference.
The performance difference between pcie2/3 on a RTX2080ti card is on the order of 2-3%
Negligible on lesser cards.