Nvidia may stick with the PCIe 4.0 interface with its next-gen Lovelace graphics cards, according to a new rumor.
This comes from a major hardware leaker on Twitter, Kopite7kimi, who leaked some new nuggets of information in some recent tweets about what will likely be RTX 4000 GPUs (although Nvidia may deviate from the obvious next step for el apellido).
Existing Nvidia RTX 3000 (Amp) GPUs use a PCIe 4.0 slot on the motherboard, but with Lovelace it was thought that Nvidia could eventually upgrade to PCIe 5.0.
Mainly because Nvidia is embracing PCIe 5.0 with Hopper, its next-gen (data center) heavy GPUs, so to some extent Team Green could be looking to move incoming consumer graphics cards in the same direction. At least from a marketing standpoint, especially now that Intel is shipping PCIe 5.0 with the 12th Gen Alder Lake lineup, and AMD is expected to embrace the cutting edge standard with the next-gen Zen 4 CPUs set to debut. later in 2022 (when Lovelace arrives).
Also, Nvidia is expected to use PCIe 5.0 power connectors with the RTX 4000 lineup, as already seen with the RTX 3090 Ti, in fact, given the high power demands of the GPU, Lovelace will theoretically use PCIe 5.0 for food, but stay there. PCIe 4.0 interface.
Review: Will we really need PCIe 5.0 before the RTX 5000 anyway?
While it might seem like an unusual situation to have a graphics card with a PCIe 5.0 power supply but connected to a PCIe 4.0 interface, it's not really surprising when you think about it further. As mentioned, the new 3090 Ti already does this, and it's meant to be something of a test run for the RTX 4000 cards, if the rumor is to be believed (as reported by Neowin). Naturally, this is all still speculation, so let's not get carried away: we're being cautious about how much stock to put into this new rumour, anyway.
Still, it makes sense that Nvidia wants to keep PCIe 4.0 for the next generation purely from a practical standpoint. It would cost more to equip Lovelace graphics cards with the latest generation PCIe 5.0 interface, and with no real endpoint: PCIe 4.0 already offers plenty of bandwidth.
While PCIe 5.0 would be future proof, of course, realistically when PCIe 4.0 struggles to keep up with gaming demands, Nvidia will likely release RTX 5000 cards, and these may come with the PCIe 5.0 interface.
In short, it doesn't look like there's a need to upgrade to PCIe 5.0 just yet, and the savings from PCIe 4.0 are probably better spent elsewhere to improve Lovelace performance. So we won't be particularly surprised if that turns out to be the case, nor will we be concerned - the real concern about the RTX 4000 family for us is the rumors of huge power consumption levels.
With stories of Lovelace graphics cards pushing power consumption up to 600W, or maybe even higher like 800W at the flagship level, that's certainly the biggest concern about next-gen GPUs. What gamers don't want is a situation where they have to think about upgrading their power supply and buying a new graphics card (GPUs are already expensive enough, though at least prices have come down lately).
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