Originally Posted by
tomshardware
In consideration of our theoretical forecasts and all the question marks we've raised, it's hard to reach a conclusion. On the one hand, the new bus opens the door for many new possibilities in the world of graphics cards. On the other hand, it will take some time before the casual user will see any advantages in the form of improved performance. 3D games aren't designed to utilize the greater transfer rates yet, and even if they did, the question remains how much of an impact the greater bandwidth of PCI Express will really have. Sure, more and more calculations are being offloaded from the CPU to the graphics processor, but the CPU and memory would still need to (be able to) generate 4GB per second of data first and then transfer it via the bus. The same holds true for video upstreams - the system memory will be hard-pressed to keep up. Even the newest hard disks can only write an average of 50MB/s, a data rate that even PCI writes could handle with ease. And as far as real-time video editing is concerned - the CPU will still need to make a few calculations every now and then - and again the memory will probably prove to be the bottleneck. Continuous data transfers at 4GB/s look set to remain a fantasy for a while to come.
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