Nvidia RTX 3080: PCIe 4.0 vs 3.0 scaling analysis

Horizon Zero Dawn is an action role-playing game developed by Guerrilla Games and published by Sony Interactive Entertainment. The plot follows Aloy, a hunter in a world overrun by machines, who sets out to uncover her past. It was released for the PlayStation 4 in 2017 and Microsoft Windows in 2020. (Wikipedia).

Engine: Decima. We test using the Ultimate Quality preset, DX12 API.

Horizon Zero Dawn is a game we introduced specifically for this testing, as we saw a number of reports suggesting the game benefitted significantly from increased PCIe bandwidth – at least when moving from PCIe 3.0 x8 to x16. We wanted to see if that carried over to PCIe Gen4 with the RTX 3080.

The data certainly suggests some benefit for PCIe 4.0, but not a lot. At 1080p, PCIe 4.0 offers a 4% performance improvement over PCIe 3.0 when both tested on AMD's X570 platform. Despite that, our Intel system still records the highest frame rates, with an 8% lead over the 3900XT system using PCIe Gen4.

At 1440p, the AMD system with PCIe 4.0 outperforms its PCIe 3.0 equivalent by 3%, though the 10900K system is itself 3% ahead. At 4K, the margins shrink to just 2FPS regardless of the test system used.

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