Hardware support: TSMC Dishes on 5nm, 4nm, and 3nm Process Nodes, Introduces 3DFabric Technology

So the Ampere launch is just around the corner, and as an Intel i9 9900K owner who wants to upgrade to Ampere, but didn't plan on upgrading his CPU/mobo mainly because I game at 4K and I think at that resolution the 9900K would be more then enough not to bottleneck even the 3090, the only thing that makes me worried is whether the bandwith of PCIe 3.0 x16 will be enough for these new cards.

Hardware unboxed released an interesting video today:

5700 XT PCIe 4.0 vs 3.0 + RTX 2080 Ti PCIe scaling

One of the interesting parts of the video can be found at 10:01, but to make it easier I made a screenshot so you don't have to find it.

It compares how different Geforce GPUs scale with PCIe 3.0 x16, x8 and x4 (so basically 3.0 x16 vs 2.0 x16 vs 1.1 x16), from the GTX 1660 Super up to the 2080 Ti. I compared the numbers to see what the difference looks like in percentage points:

RTX 2080 Ti average framerate:	x16: 100%	x8: 92,8%	x4: 75,7%
RTX 2080 Ti minimum framerate:	x16: 100%	x8: 92,2%	x4: 64,4%
RTX 2080 average framerate:	x16: 100%	x8: 94,2%	x4: 79%
RTX 2080 minimum framerate:	x16: 100%	x8: 95,2%	x4: 70,8%
RTX 2070 average framerate:	x16: 100%	x8: 93,85%	x4: 82%
RTX 2070 minimum framerate:	x16: 100%	x8: 94,2%	x4: 76%
RTX 2060 average framerate:	x16: 100%	x8: 97,5%	x4: 88,8%
RTX 2060 minimum framerate:	x16: 100%	x8: 95,8%	x4: 84,9%
GTX 1660 Super average framerate:	x16: 100%	x8: 97,6%	x4: 86,6%
GTX 1660 Super minimum framerate:	x16: 100%	x8: 99%	x4: 79,8%

Sadly they only tested this one game like this, there are other games that were not at all affected when they used PCIe x8 insted of x16 with the 2080 Ti, but what's interesting about these results is, that they way a lot of us tought about PCIe bandwidth is that it's a wall, once a GPU is fast enough hit the limit, it will stop performance scaling dead on its tracks. So if the 2080 Ti is fast enough to overwhelm PCIe 3.0 x8, but it only loses a few percentage points of performance then the 2080 shouldn't lose any performance at all. And if the 2080 is fast enough to overwhelm PCIe 3.0 x8 then the 2080 Ti shouldn't be faster at all then 2080 using PCIe 3.0 x8.

But this is not the case. All GPUs lose some performance using x8 mode and more using x4 in this title, and while slower GPUs lose less performance, the loss of performance is not in line with the performance difference of the cards. For instance the strongest GPU in the list, the 2080 Ti loses 7.2% performance of average framerate, and the weakest in the list, the 1660 loses 2.4%. The loss of performance is bigger using the 2080 Ti, sure, but the 2080 Ti is around 2 times as fast as the 1660 Super so I think it should be way more.

Actually the 2080 loses 5.8% performance in average framerates using x8, while the weaker 2070 6,15% performance. The same can be seen when comparing the weaker 1660% losing 2,4% performance to the stronger 2060 losing 2,5%. This is all margin of error stuff, but it can be concluded, that the performance of the card doesn't directly scale with the loss of performance using less bandwith, and even if a weaker GPU is already bottlenecked by the PCIe bandwith, using a faster GPU will still result in an increase in performance. The same can't be said about CPU bottleneck, if the CPU holds back the GPU, putting in a more powerful GPU in your system will not significantly increase the performance.

Of course bottleneck heavily depends on the title used for testing.

In light of this, what do you guys think, how badly will PCIe 3.0 x16 hold back the next generation of high-end GPUs?

PS: Sorry for the long post.

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ClockTuner Unlocks Higher Performance, Lower Power Consumption on AMD Zen 2 CPUs

Posted: 24 Aug 2020 03:52 PM PDT

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(igor'sLAB) Comes AMD’s new and still secret “Lucienne” APU exclusively as 8-core only for Google? OPN and first data leaked!

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Rumor: Pixel 5 is slower than the Pixel 4, has same camera as the Pixel 2

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