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[JEMC]

Captain_Yuri said:

JEMC said:

Two things come to mid from that article:

1) Anyone on a pre-Alder Lake/Zen4 system will get screwed because that also limits the cards to x8 PCIe 4.0 on those systems. And there's a lot of mid-range gamers that won't upgrade yet. 

So, those that wanted to make just a CPU upgrade on their AM4 systems to keep up while they wait for AM5 to mature will have to keep their current GPUs or go for something like a 4060Ti or higher. But how many people that can afford one of those GPUs will "go cheap" with their CPU/system?

And 2) While the jump in performance to someting between the 3070 and 3070Ti doesn't sound like much, a quick loot at the database from TechPowerUp tells us something else:

https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/geforce-rtx-3060.c3682

A 50% increase doesn't sound too bad, at least on systems with a PCIe 5.0 slot.

Well actually. It's more like pre-PCI-E Gen 4 that will get screwed. Since Lovelace is going to have PCI-E Gen 4, PCI-E Gen 4 platforms will get full bandwidth from Lovelace GPUs even if it is just x8. But if you pair it up with a platform that is PCI-E Gen 3, that's when the issue arises:

PCI-E Gen 4 on motherboard + x8 PCI-E Gen 4 GPU = 16GB/s = Full bandwidth going to the Lovelace GPU
PCI-E Gen 3 on motherboard + x8 PCI-E Gen 4 GPU = 8GB/s = Half bandwidth going to the Lovelace GPU

So if you have a PCI-E Gen 4 system, you have nothing to worry about. The real kicker is how AMD decided to mess with the CPU configurations on Ryzen 5000. 5600G/5700G are all PCI-E Gen 3 so even if you pair them up with a Gen 4 motherboards, you will get Gen 3 speeds. One of the main reasons I said to avoid that CPU line. So we can't even say, pre-zen 2 either.

And yea, you do have a good point. I forgot how big of a leap the 3070/Ti is.

You're right, the performance loss won't be huge, but that will depend on how much memory the 4060 and lower get. Because the more they'll have to rely on system RAM, the more performance they'll lose, even at 1080p.