[SOLVED] Ryzen vs Comet Lake for PCIe 4.0

[seymoorebutts]

After watching Sony and Epic's PS5 Unreal 5 Tech Demo, me gots some questions. (this is the demo I am referencing https://www.tomshardware.com/news/playastation-5-demo-unreal-engine-5)

My poor ol rig has been chugging along gracefully with its i7 3770K, 770 2GB, 8 GB DDR3 and 1 TB HDD, but it's time to pull the plug. I'm looking to build a future proofed monster, but it just blows my mind that Intel isn't properly intergrating PCIe 4.0 with its 10th generation processors, and AMD is already here. I think I saw somewhere that there are some MoBos for sale or soon available that will offer Intel chipsets AND PCIe 4.0, but these would be or Intel's 11th gen or later. I'm all down to splurge on this upcoming build, but I cannot in good faith buy a 10700K and then an 11700K 1 year later, not when Intel is so comfy giving us the middle finger (they have for a little bit now).

Now the big ol' elephant in the room is whether or not all this even matters. The PS5's SSD can pull 5.5GB/s through PCIe 4.0, while today's best NVMe SSD's can do around 4GB/s on PCIe (if I remember right, don't quote me). Is that extra 1.5GB/s really the gamechanger, does it have to do more with Sony's custom 12 channel controller, is it about how Unreal Engine 5 operates, or is it a combination of everthing? How long will it even take games to really even take advantage of these new technologies and architecture for it to be meaningful?

What do?

 

[InvalidError]

That particular low end card (5500XT) was not only built for it, it obviously way too much depended on it... so much so that it sucked in PCI-e 3.0 mode for assorted reasons.

Nothing surprising there: you run the 4GB RX5500 into scenarios where it runs out of VRAM long before running out of GPU-power, the RX5500 gets a massive boost from PCIe4 from having access to twice as much system memory bandwidth to offset its VRAM deficit. I expect this to become the norm and make PCIe 4.0x16 mandatory for 6GB-or-less GPUs.

Ironic how something some perceive as a "high-end" feature may end up yielding its largest benefits by far at the very bottom.

 

[Makaveli]

Like moving files from and to that drive.

Correct that is something that is bandwidth limited.

I'm not sure what people are expecting these drives are all based on the same technology which is NAND flash. Doubling the bandwidth alone isn't going to give us a huge improvement in all area's when nothing else has changed.

 

[seymoorebutts]

I'm not sure I follow you here...I use a fast nVME SSD for my game drive and I am always loaded into the game lobby waiting for everyone else to enter the game. I'm also the first one to spawn into each game once it starts and watch the others pop in as they catch up...many of my friends have internet connections that embarrass mine so I know it's the PC's holding them back.

I'm not saying that SSDs don't provide ANY benefits for gaming, heavily reducing load times is defnitely beneficial, espcially when loading large, open world games like Red Dead or The Witcher 3. But in game, during gameplay, SSDs do not provide any added benefit over HDDs.

 

[seymoorebutts]

Same reasons most games are still lightly threaded: it takes extra development effort and substantially raises the minimum specs since you now need extra RAM and CPU to handle asset streaming.

Would overhead be meaningfully reduced for asset streaming with PCIe 4, or would it merely increase the potential?

 

[seymoorebutts]

If you are in a hurry to update, just don't, wait atleast till the new 10th gen Intel CPU reviews surface in a few days (We are soo close now). Once you read and watched a lot of 10th gen Intel CPU reviews, then you may be able to find out if Ryzen or Intel deserves your money.
But keep in mind Intel have not said (so far ) that the next 11th gen will drop on to the same LGA 1200 socket, nor have said anything about having support for PCIe 4.0, and I don't beliebe they will going to say it soon because....
Intel probably want everyone paying attention to the new 10th gen launch, the reviews and the benchamrk; and not to some CPU thats many, many, many months away.

The only thing we can be sure for now, according to rumors and what some motherboard makers said (mostly off the record) is that the new Z490 motherboard may have some sort of PCIe 4.0 support.

But as many have wrote here already, PCIe 3.0 still plenty enough for most task. And unless you run a benchmarks all day long just for the fun of it, or you use the PC to earn money theres no much you will gain from PCIe 4.0 today or in the next months.

If you really care and want/need PCIe 4.0 support, for the time been you have 1 option, and thats Ryzen 3xxx + X570 motherboards (and soon, with some limitations, B550 ones).

Cheers

Well, to be fair, I don't think Intel deserves anyone's money after their grotesque market practices the last few decades haha.

I really do hope AMD can offer better gaming performance at the same price point as Intel's upcoming CPUs. It's a shame I don't do much on my computer that really takes advantage of multithreaded performance, I would kiss Intel goodbye in a heartbeat.

 

[InvalidError]

Would overhead be meaningfully reduced for asset streaming with PCIe 4, or would it merely increase the potential?

The overhead would be the same as PCIe3, the only hing that changes is lower turn-around latency from having twice as much bandwidth to complete IOs with. Faster IO completions means less chances of software having stutter from waiting after something that did not arrive in time.

What I'm really wondering about is how large games would need to get to really need GBs/s of random read bandwidth. If assets within the FoV are zooming by this fast, I doubt they will be sufficiently steady on screen for people to register details.

 

[seymoorebutts]

There are some benefits to PCIe 4 for AMD graphics cards built for it...for example the guys at Hardware Unboxed found a boost at 1440p for the 5500xt in games like CoD MW 2019. I'm guessing big Navi will benefit also but it remains to be seen under what conditions...admittedly those conditions are pretty limited at this point but tomorrows a new day.

View: https://youtu.be/-EDJXISD6RY?t=455

The most interesting thing to me about these implications for graphics cards are that if more can be done with less lanes, building high powered, small form factor PCs will get a lot easier and have much more room for other add-ons to the motherboard, which is neato!

 

[InvalidError]

The most interesting thing to me about these implications for graphics cards are that if more can be done with less lanes, building high powered, small form factor PCs will get a lot easier and have much more room for other add-ons to the motherboard, which is neato!

Have you actually looked at how cramped mATX and ITX boards already are with just built-in CPU and chipset IO? Shaving lanes off the GPU slot does you no good when there is no physical space on the board to do anything else with them.

 

[Karadjgne]

No fair. That's apples and oranges. There's plenty of real estate on itx mobo's, they just need to get rid of all the stupidity like TPM modules, 5050 strip headers, 2x hdmi and a DP on the rear, fancy rgb side lighting etc. If vendors made 2 different itx, one with all the semi-useless bling, and another based more on actual performance, there wouldn't be any issues to fitting things like usb-c headers or pcie4.0 requirements with higher mobo layers.

 

[IDProG]

I suppose a new question for all of this then would be why haven't developers designed games to utilize this implemenation of SSD's until now?

Well, that's actually extremely simple.

Because consoles still use HDD.

When consoles move from HDD to SSD, that's when games start to be optimized for SSD.

It's sad that games are optimized around consoles, but that's the truth, the hard truth.

 

[seymoorebutts]

Well, that's actually extremely simple.

Because consoles still use HDD.

When consoles move from HDD to SSD, that's when games start to be optimized for SSD.

It's sad that games are optimized around consoles, but that's the truth, the hard truth.

Without a doubt. Hopefully, consoles ditching physical storage might be the kick in the pants to work on a little more innovation.