[TwoNineA]

I hope for a little more PCIe lanes so I can run 2 gaming VMs on these and upgrade my old Threadripper.

[dogma1138]

There is fuck all difference between x8 and x16 for gaming. Heck with PCIe5 even dropping to x4 is borderline noticeable outside of benchmarks.

[Sohcahtoa82]

100% this

The PCI-Express bus is actually rather slow. Only ~63 GB/s, even with PCIe 5 x16!

PCIe is simply not a bottleneck for gaming. All the textures and models are loaded into the GPU once, when the game loads, then re-used from VRAM for every frame. Otherwise, a scene with a lowly 2 GB of assets would cap out at only ~30 fps.

Which is funny to think about historically. I remember when AGP first came out, and it was advertised as making it so GPUs wouldn't need tons of memory, only enough for the frame buffers, and that they would stream texture data across AGP. Well, the demands for bandwidth couldn't keep up. And now, even if the port itself was fast enough, the system RAM wouldn't be. DDR5-6400 running in dual-channel mode is only ~102 GB/s. On the flip side the RTX 5050, a current-gen budget card, has over 3x that at 320 GB/s, and on the top end, the RTX 5090 is 1.8 TB/s.

[magicalhippo]

Main problem seems to be they're kinda badly utilized (IMHO) on many motherboards. Most seem to go with two x16 slots so you get x8 lanes in both.

There are some exceptions, but I haven't seen one with for example four x16 slots that support PCIe 5.0 x4 lanes with bifurcation.

[johnbellone]

The biggest difference for me for PCIe 5.0 has been additional bandwidth for my M2 drive.

[Gracana]

Your comment is basically the "tl;dr" of this Techpowerup article (which is great and people should read it if they are unconvinced or curious): https://www.techpowerup.com/review/nvidia-geforce-rtx-5090-p...

[toast0]

You're not getting more lanes without a new socket. Or a PCIe switch, which is expensive.

[rowanG077]

This. I needed a high speed link between two PCs and bought a mellanox card, cue me surprised that a consumers PCs do not have enough PCIe lanes to handle both a thickboii GPU and a thickboii 200GBe mellanox card...

[Szpadel]

for that you need new socket and motherboard. you need to physically route those extra lanes to pcie slots or other components

[wtallis]

And even when AMD does move their mainstream desktop processors to a new socket, there's very little reason to expect them to be trying to accommodate multi-GPU setups. SLI and Crossfire are dead, multi-GPU gaming isn't coming back for the foreseeable future, so multi-GPU is more or less a purely workstation/server feature at this point. They're not going to increase the cost of their mainstream platform for the sole purpose of cannibalizing Threadripper sales.

[dmos62]

Had to look up what vm gaming is. What's your motivation? If you don't mind sharing.