If you’re excited at the prospect of what PCIe 4.0 can do for gaming, don’t be. That’s according to Intel, which released new charts that attempt to prove why it is pointless for gamers.
The initial argument is that the most popular resolutions don’t fully saturate the PCIe 3.0 x15 interface.
Intel then referenced benchmarks by TechPowerUp, which showed negligible performance gains between PCIe 3.0 x4 and PCIe 3.0 x16. The point is that PCIe 4.0 x16 would provide a similarly tiny improvement.
Intel has discovered that launching games and loading levels doesn’t even saturate the PCIe 3.0 x 4 interface. Intel looked at a handful of games using internal testing utilities and found that most games are hitting peak read speeds of under 500 MB/s during launch and level loads. DOOM for PC used over 2 GB/s, but that was still far below the capabilities of the Samsung SSD 970 PRO 1TB NVMe drive that they used for testing. It looks like PCIe Gen4 just isn’t going to matter for gamers.