3DMark can now measure bandwidth over the PCI Express bus

Next week, AMD will launch the new Ryzen 3000 processor family, which will be the first consumer platform to support the PCI Express 4.0 interface. While PCI Express 4.0 doubles the theoretical bandwidth set against the previous standard, the performance gains for graphics cards that use the interface are expected to be extremely marginal, and instead SSD-based storage devices are raised as the big winners.

UL Benchmarks is now releasing an update to the 3DMark software that adds a subtest to measure bandwidth over the PCI Express bus. The test sends large amounts of vertex and texture data to the graphics circuit and is designed to measure the bandwidth available on a 16-lane PCI Express 4.0 port.

This is a synthetic test. In real-world use, your PC’s gaming performance is extremely unlikely to be limited by PCIe bandwidth.

In its technical documentation for 3DMark, UL Benchmarks emphasizes that the new subtest is of a synthetic nature, and that the results are most likely not representative of loads produced by actual game titles.

The new subtest PCI Express Feature Test is available now via a free update to 3DMark Professional Edition and 3DMark Advanced Edition.

Read more about PCI Express