According to Kopite7kimi, NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 40 series graphics cards based on the Ada Lovelace GPU architecture are expected to retain their PCIe Gen 4.0 compliance.
Later this year, NVIDIA will release its GeForce RTX 40 series graphics cards, which will be built on the brand new Ada Lovelace GPU architecture. The graphics card lineup’s specifications and specific configurations have previously been revealed, but the design of the cards themselves is a more interesting feature.
So far, we know that the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 40 series graphics cards will use the new ATX 3.0 compliant 12PVHPWR 16-pin connector, which supports up to 600W over a new PCIe Gen 5 power connector interface. The GeForce RTX 3090 Ti graphics card already features this power connector, which enables up to 450W of power draw with a triple 8-pin adaptor. However, there is another factor that must be considered to achieve full PCIe Gen 5.0 compliance, and that is the interface connector.
Modern graphics cards use the PCIe Gen 4.0 standard to communicate with the CPU
The PCIe Gen 4.0 standard allows for a total bandwidth of 64 GB/s and bi-directional bandwidth of 32 GB/s. However, the latest Intel and AMD processors support the brand new PCIe Gen 5.0 interface standard. This new standard allows for overall bandwidth of up to 128 GB/s and bi-directional bandwidth of up to 64 GB/s. This effectively doubles the bandwidth, but it appears that future graphics cards, or at least the high-end GeForce RTX 40 graphics cards based on the AD102 GPU, will not include the PCIe Gen 5.0 interface.
According to a tweet from Kopite7kimi, the next GeForce RTX 40 range will stick with the PCIe Gen 4.0 protocol, which is a brave choice by NVIDIA given that they are adopting the next-gen standard in the HPC industry, where their Hopper GPU will be among the first to do so. It’s only natural that it’s included in the HPC portfolio because servers require a lot of bandwidth, and the Gen 5.0 protocol will aid those environments. The PCIe Gen 5.0 interface is simply too much bandwidth for consumers, and contemporary GPUs have yet to fully mature the PCIe Gen 4.0 interface.
PCIe Gen 4.0 is good news for the entry-level lineup, which won’t have to worry about bottlenecks if they have lower lanes, as was the case with the Radeon RX 6500 and RX 6400 series, which had less than required graphics bandwidth when switching to the Gen 3 standard, resulting in poor performance compared to a PCIe Gen 4.0 compliant standard.
If the high-end lineup isn’t starving the Gen 4.0 standard, the low-end lineup is still a long way from reaching the limit. We can’t say for sure whether NVIDIA will keep PCIe Gen 4.0 on its future RTX 40 series cards, but that might change if marketing likes the PCIe Gen 5.0 badge on the new cards.
Aside from supporting PCIe Gen 5.0 and PCIe Gen 4.0, NVIDIA appears to be changing the way its CUDA cores are organized under the Ada Lovelace architecture. The GPUs for the GeForce RTX 40 series could include a range of additional mixed-precision cores that haven’t been described yet, as well as a basic CUDA core bump from Ampere.
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