Looking ahead, pascal, broadwell-e, nvlink

[Fizzy Coca-Cola]

I'm using a very nice rig at the moment to play games, but I built it in 2012, adding on parts occasionally, these are specs:

Windows 10
i5-3570k @ 3.8GHz
MSI Z77A-G43 MOBO
H60 Cpu cooler
MSI GTX 970
4 x 2GB ram at 1600MHz
128GB OCZ Vertex4
256GB Samsung
1440p Asus 60Hz
1080p Samsung, 60Hz
1600x900 HP (for TS3, really)

I'm looking to upgrade to a PCIe based SSD setup in the next few months with a pascal GPU and the newest CPU, with the idea in mind that I'll be able to upgrade the GPU in a year or two to a SLI setup with hope that DX 12 mixed GPU will allow for better sli performance.

With that in mind, it seems i'll need something with more than 16 PCI lanes. The skylake 6xxx CPUs come with 16 lanes, while the haswell-e CPUs are 28 or 40, depending on the model #. I'm expeciting the $600/$550 versions of broadwell-e to have 40 PCI lanes, and I'm hoping nvlink/PCIe 4.0 will not ruin my upgrade paths in the future, but I've only been building PCs for 4 years now, and I'm not sure what the future looks like concerning those.

My expectations are this:
buy a CPU/mobo that can support single/dual/triple pascal cards in the next 3 months/1 year/2 years respectively, while scaling up in FPS at given settings close to 100%/200% from single card. It looks like dx12 will be a good avenue for adding second generation Pascal and Volta cards along side each other by the time volta hits the consumer in 2.5 years.

any advice on this project would be helpful, particularly concerning pascal/nvlink/broadwell-e

 

[Grooveriding]

AFAIK nvlink is not for consumer GPUs. Get an X99 board and HW-E or BW-E if it's out within the 3 month time frame.

 

[imported_bman]

Don't forget about Intel's 3D-Xpoint.

 

[Fizzy Coca-Cola]

it looks like 3d xpoint will work well as a lightning fast pcie SSD, some time in 2017. I'll be able to add it in.

 

[VirtualLarry]

NVLink is not an Intel technology, and, AFAIK, they will not be adding it to their CPUs. I believe that tech is only for OpenPower CPUs.

 

[NTMBK]

Yup, don't expect NVLink on Intel. PCIe 4 on the E-series chips, maybe, but I kind of expect the consumer parts to stay at PCIe 3.

 

[itsmydamnation]

stopped caring about new PCI-E after v2. honestly who really cares.

 

[NTMBK]

stopped caring about new PCI-E after v2. honestly who really cares.

Asset sizes have got a lot bigger since the new consoles came around. Just look at the size of modern game installs. If you're playing e.g. an open world game streaming lots of data into the GPU, it can make a difference.

 

[itsmydamnation]

Asset sizes have got a lot bigger since the new consoles came around. Just look at the size of modern game installs. If you're playing e.g. an open world game streaming lots of data into the GPU, it can make a difference.

your spinning rust will make a much bigger difference, AFAIK gen 3/4 dont bring any latency improvements, just throughput per pin. Honestly when is 16GB\s insufficient?

Also game consoles rely heavily on streaming of assets because their disks are so slow. The interconnect between the cpu and gpu on both consoles is also only in the range of 20GB/s ( depending on coherency etc).

 

[therealnickdanger]

PCIe speed makes the biggest difference in multi-GPU setups, but still not a large one.

http://www.guru3d.com/articles_pages/pci_express_scaling_game_performance_analysis_review,1.html

It's possible that once Vulkan/DX12 arrive and start doing more creative things back and forth on the PCIe bus, we'll see that gap widen.

Personally, for my next platform, I would rather see more lanes available than faster lanes.

 

[ShintaiDK]

Personally, for my next platform, I would rather see more lanes available than faster lanes.

64x lanes? That will be expensive and take up a lot of space. So that's not going to happen. If anything you rather get a completely new standard. That would also be the time for it after PCIe 4.0.

Speed gets more and more important as games grow. And I think 2.0 single GPU users will really start to suffer with 14/16nm. When 8-16GB becomes the norm.

 

[NTMBK]

your spinning rust will make a much bigger difference, AFAIK gen 3/4 dont bring any latency improvements, just throughput per pin. Honestly when is 16GB\s insufficient?

If you have the asset cached in RAM, the bottleneck moves to your PCIe link. (But yes, if loading off disk, that is going to be problem #1.)

 

[tweakboy]

Broadway all the way! according to benches at least.