NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Founders Edition Review

NOTE: This is an excerpt from my NVIDIA RTX 3080 to confirm if PCI Gen4 has a performance impact on the new RTX 30 series cards. Quick answer is no. But read on for more details:

We’ll start this off with the most frequently asked question: do I need to have PCIe Gen4 to maximize the RTX 3080? We’ll answer that here. Given that PCI Express Gen4 is only present on AMD platforms, this test will answer two questions: 1) does Gen4 have an impact and 2) do we test with Intel or AMD?

Here are our two test bench that we maintain for situations like this. I was already considering switching to AMD earlier this year but with Intel still holding on to their performance crown by a little bit, we stay for 1 more generation. Back to our test, our two systems will help us show show which system to use for this review.

For testing, we use the Final Fantasy XV benchmark. I find this benchmark more realistic than 3DMark Time Spy but speaking of 3DMark, here’s a quick summary of some tests done with 3DMark for our Gen3 vs Gen4 comparison:

This tests goes through the feature tests as well as the more intense benchmarks from the 3DMark suite. We have a 2080 Ti on the Intel system just for a quick comparison if we do get a massive jump. There is a PCI Express test in 3DMark and we can see have an improvement there, proving that gen4 is still indeed present but in actual GPU performance, Gen4 does not really impact everything as the Intel system proves the better system from pure synthetics.

Back to Final Fantasy XV, testing on the same system with Gen3 against Gen4 we get the benchmark results below:

In an AMD vs AMD setup, the difference can be accounted to standard deviation. Here’s some further charts for your reference:

The final set of charts shows us that we still get a minimal advantage on an Intel system which ultimately led me to decide to stick with our Intel system. This testing was done 3 days ago and thankfully results are favorable in my case as I would need to retest the entire lot we have.