Does NVIDIA RTX 3090 Lose Performance on PCIe 3.0 Motherboards?

The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 Ampere architecture is the best performing gaming graphics card of the brand. With 10,496 CUDA cores at 1.70 GHz in its Founders Edition model, the manufacturer promises gaming at 8K resolution and 60 FPS without problems, but so much raw power has raised a reasonable doubt, and that is whether it will be necessary to have a platform that PCI-Express 4.0 support to get the most out of it, since PCI-Express 3.0 could be a bottleneck .

The latest generation graphics cards are already compatible with version 4.0 of the PCI-Express interface, an interface that practically doubles the bandwidth of PCI-Express 3.0 and that has raised the reasonable doubt of whether it will be necessary to get the most out of it to the new NVIDIA flagship.

NVIDIA RTX 3090

Velocidades-PCIe

Given the raw power of the RTX 3090, there are not few users who have wondered if having a platform with PCI-Express 3.0 will suffer bottlenecks or if on the contrary they will be able to obtain all the performance that the new graphics is capable of providing. Luckily, a representative from NVIDIA has come to the fore to solve this question.

Is PCIe 3.0 enough to get the most out of the RTX 3090?

“System performance is affected by many factors, and the impact varies depending on the application. This impact is only a small percentage when going from PCIe 4.0 x16 to PCIe 3.0 x16, and in fact the choice of processor will often have greater impact on performance than using either generation of the PCI-Express interface. We look forward to new platforms that can take full advantage of Gen4 capabilities for potential performance increases. “

What the NVIDIA representative is confirming with these statements is that effectively using a PCI-Express 3.0 x16 interface with an RTX 3090 will have an impact on its performance, although he plays down a lot of importance by saying that we will only lose a small percentage of performance. and that it will be much more important to have a powerful processor according to the power of the graphics than this.

Rendimiento RTX 3090

At the time we saw a comparison of PCIe 3.0 vs PCIe 4.0 in gaming, resulting in that the VRAM of the graphics card had a great importance in this; games are increasingly RAMCaché due to the inability to find enough space in the graphics RAM, loading a greater amount of texture information in the system RAM.

However, given that this NVIDIA RTX 3090 incorporates no less than 24 GB of GDDR6X memory with a 384-bit bus, it does not seem likely that any game will find itself in the position that it does not have enough VRAM to store its textures and that need to pull RAMCaché, so it does seem that, at least as the theory goes, the NVIDIA rep is absolutely correct in his claims.

The bottom line from this is that yes, you will have a bit of a bottleneck if you use a GeForce RTX 3090 with a PCI-Express 3.0 x16 platform, but the impact will be quite low and especially compared to the bottleneck and loss of performance that you would have when using a processor not powerful enough.

What processor will you need to avoid a bottleneck?

NVIDIA has not commented on this aspect, so we can only recommend “high-end” processors. According to NVIDIA itself and also according to logic, the more powerful the processor, the less likely it is to cause a bottleneck with the powerful RTX 3090, so what we would recommend (and this is our recommendation) would be the following:

  • Intel Core i7-10700K or higher.
  • AMD Ryzen 5 3600X or better.