Are you ready for 16GB/s PCI Express x16 slots? Not sure how fast that is? Well PCI-SIG has just released the new PC Express 3.0 base specification, allowing members of the organization to grab it right now directly from its website. The group claimed that the new spec is capable of doubling the bandwidth per-lane over current second-generation PCI-E and indirectly also quadruples the bandwidth compared to the first generation PCIE , all the while maintaining backward compatibility.

How does this come by? Well, in order to achieve this bizarre speed, PCI Express 3.0 has its signalling rate beefed up from 5GT/s of 2.0 to 8GT/s in the new 3.0 specification. 3.0 also have the 8b/10b encoding replaced with a more efficient 128b/130b encoding scheme, which increases the amount of actual data pushed per transfer. The result of this uprating is a 1GB/s per-lane bandwidth in each direction.

PCI-SIG’s announcement also mentions miscellaneous enhancements introduced in the new spec:
These enhancements range in scope from data reuse hints, atomic operations, dynamic power adjustment mechanisms, latency tolerance reporting, loose transaction ordering, I/O page faults, BAR resizing and many more extensions in support of platform energy efficiency, software model flexibility and architectural scalability.

Rumour has it that products based on this new specification could be out as early as June of next year. Intel might adopt PCIE 3.0 in its server products by the end of next year, as well. Then again, the benefits of increased performance might not be that significant to end users actually. As of current state, there’s no need for a PCIE 3.0 specification, as current PCIE 2.0 will not bottleneck current graphic cards at all.

The thing here is, all your textures are loaded in the VRAM before you even start rendering, and that’s where your game actually starts getting processes. Once loaded, there won’t be any huge data transfer in and out of your graphic card. Current generation graphic cards will never maximize the PCIE 2.0, and unless next generation graphic cards will have higher power supplied to the card (which is quite impossible as they’re restricted), it is quite impossible to bottleneck current PCIE 2.0. The only possible usage of PCIE 3.0 is SSD on PCIE, and that has yet to lift off in a big way right now.

SOURCE via Tech Report