PCI Express testing comes to 3DMARK

With PCIe 4.0 on the horizon and bitcoin pricing rising above $9,000, the need for PCI Express testing has never been greater. Do you want to test how fast PCIe 4.0 is, see how much bandwidth your PCIe extension cable sacrifices or how much bandwidth your mining rig’s GPUs get over that cheap PCIe 1x to 16x riser card? That’s now possible with 3DMARK’s new PCIe Express feature test. 

While this test may not be useful for judging game performance, it will be helpful for hardware reviewers and analysts, especially as more and more PCs start connecting to graphics cards and other peripherals via Thunderbolt 3 and similar interconnectivity standards. 

While UL Benchmarks has designed this test with PCIe 4.0 in mind, its usefulness extends beyond this single scenario. That being said, this benchmark may show some developers that they could be more heavily utilising the bandwidth available via PCIe 4.0, or even PCIe 3.0, opening the door to increased bandwidth utilisation.   

      PCI Express (PCIe) is a standard interface that provides high-bandwidth communication between devices in your PC. New PCIe 4.0 interfaces provide up to twice the bandwidth of PCIe 3.0. With more bandwidth, games can transfer more data, reduce loading times, and support more complex scenes.
The 3DMark PCI Express feature test measures the bandwidth available to your GPU.