Nvidia has already introduced PCIe 5.0 power connectors in its recently launched $1,999 GeForce RTX 3090 Ti graphics card. The various partner models of the card are coming with one or even two 16-pin PCIe power cables where each of these are capable of an insane 600W of output. It is even rumored that the RTX 3090 Ti PCB, among others, is itself a test drive for its next-gen RTX 4000 Ada Lovelace cards.
And while Nvidia is making great strides to add the new power standard for its next-gen cards for additional power headroom, the company is purportedly only adding PCIe 4.0 bus capabilities on Ada Lovelace RTX 40-series GPUs, according to reliable leakster kopite7kimi. If true, the upcoming Nvidia RTX cards will be limited to just 2GB/s per lane uni-directionally.
PCIe 5.0 is something which Nvidia already announced with its Hopper architecture that"s meant for data center and high-performance computing (HPC) markets. Hence, it is slightly surprising to see that Nvidia may not offer the same feature parity for its consumer gaming lineup.
In terms of support, Intel has already introduced PCIe 5.0 on its 12th Alder Lake platform while AMD will also be bringing it with Zen 4 and Socket AM5 soon by the end of the year. However, it"s not confirmed so far whether either Intel or AMD is bringing PCIe 5.0 support in their respective Arc Alchemist or RDNA 3 GPUs.
Source: kopite7kimi (Twitter)