Nvidia RTX 3080: PCIe 4.0 vs 3.0 scaling analysis

By the time you are reading this, RTX 3080 reviews will be live and we will know exactly how fast this new Ampere GPU really is. But what about PCIe 4.0 – does it make a difference? Were we wrong to use Intel's Comet Lake-S platform for our RTX 3080 review data? Let's answer that question by directly comparing RTX 3080 performance on AMD's X570 platform with PCIe 4.0, versus Intel Z490 and PCIe 3.0.

If you haven't already read our full RTX 3080 review, I would recommend doing so first. That will give you an idea of how this new GPU compares to the likes of the RTX 2080 Ti, GTX 1080 Ti and more. In this article, we are only looking at performance of the RTX 3080, but tested on different CPU platforms.

Here, we are comparing three sets of data. First of all, the data we used for our review – the RTX 3080 Founders Edition tested with an Intel i9-10900K overclocked to 5.1GHz, restricting us to PCIe 3.0 due to the Z490 platform. To give us an idea of PCIe Gen4 performance with this GPU, we turn to AMD's Ryzen 9 3900XT and the X570 platform. As a final data set, we also force PCIe 3.0 while testing with the Ryzen 9 3900XT.

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