Gadgetory

alright I'm gonna take another crack at my PCIe 16x versus 8x versus 4x testing this time I'm going to use a couple of games that I've benchmarked quite a bit in the past we're gonna go with Battlefield Bad Company 2 as well as Metro 2033 since I had people asking for not a purely synthetic test so I'm going to use the 6990 again single card gonna run at 16 X 8 X + 4 X PCIe bandwidth and see what kind of performance differences we see at 1080p running in these games so this was interesting not only did I test that'll feel bad company 2 and metro 2033 actually I've got my fraps one of my fresh results up here right now apparently I have a lot of them up here right now ok so I also added Crysis 2 to the testing methodology so here you go here my results in a very tiny little graph that I have made on a piece of paper along with a list of stuff that I had to do the other day ok so here we are oh please focus come on you're kidding me ok yeah okay so Crysis 2 from 16x to 8x we're looking at pretty much within margin of error but then as soon as we drop down to 4x PCIe band width we lose about 6 - well 6 to 8 FPS so that's going to be about 10% so we do see a tangible real-world performance decrease on a very high performance card in Crysis 2 going down to 4x that'll feel bad company 2 once again we see cut it within the margin of error and then as soon as we go down to 4x we see a very dramatic decrease in performance about 30% so metro 2033 is same story this is margin of error right here and then moving down to 4x we see a 12% performance dropped so basically this goes against the findings that I found before and I believe I know the reason so running the extreme preset on 3d mark 11 basically meant that the processors on the radio on 69 you were completely taxed so we were creating a processor bottleneck which meant that there didn't have to be as much communication between the card and the rest of the system because we weren't able to actually we were we were limited by how much rendering these cores could do rather than by how quickly the card could communicate with the system so running at 1080p with some modern games we were able to create a scenario whereby new card was not actually the bottleneck in the performance of the system in that particular game so the processors were able to do more than the PCI Express bandwidth was capable of communicating so basically what we see here then is that as soon as pcie 3.0 comes out we're probably looking at a scenario remember PCI Express is doubling in bandwidth every time we see a new iteration but we're probably looking at a scenario where any modern card will perform about like this at pcie 3.0 for X and will perform about like this at PCIe pcie 3.0 8 X and then there will be a hypothetical probably like incremental 0.2 fps beyond that so for any modern card and remember this is two modern high-end GPUs those are each 69 70s on there for any two modern high-end GPUs PCIe 8 X is pretty much enough and 16 X is definitely enough based on how little improvement we see by doubling the bandwidth from PCIe 8x slot to 16x slot so thank you for checking out this episode of - tech tips don't forget to subscribe for more unboxings reviews and other computer videos