 Alright, I'm gonna take another crack at my PCIe 16x versus 8x versus 4x testing. This time I'm gonna use a couple of games that I've benchmarked quite a bit in the past. We're gonna go with Battlefield Bad Company 2 as well as Metro 2033 since I had people asking for not a purely synthetic test. So I'm going to use the 6990 again, single card, gonna run at 16x, 8x and 4x PCIe bandwidth and see what kind of performance differences we see at 1080p running in these games. So this was interesting. Not only did I test Battlefield Bad Company 2 and Metro 2033, actually I've got my FRAPS, one of my FRAPS results up here right now. Oh, apparently I have a lot of them up here right now. Okay, so I also added Crisis 2 to the testing methodology. So here you go, here are my results in a very tidy little graph that I have made on a piece of paper along with a list of stuff that I had to do the other day. Okay, so here we are. Oh, please focus, come on. Don't be kidding me. Focus, focus. There we go, yeah, yeah. Okay, so Crisis 2. From 16x to 8x we're looking at pretty much within margin of error, but then as soon as we drop down to 4x PCIe bandwidth we lose about 6 to 8 FPS, so that's going to be about 10%. So we do see a tangible real world performance decrease on a very high performance card in Crisis 2 going down to 4x. Battlefield Bad Company 2 once again we see kind of within the margin of error and then as soon as we go down to 4x we see a very dramatic decrease in performance, about 30%. So Metro 2033, same story, this is margin of error right here, and then moving down to 4x we see a 12-ish percent performance drop. So basically this goes against the findings that I found before and I believe I know the reason. So running the Extreme preset on 3DMark 11 basically meant that the processors on the Radeon 6990 were completely taxed. So we were creating a processor bottleneck which meant that there didn't have to be as much communication between the card and the rest of the system because we weren't able to actually, we were limited by how much rendering these cores could do rather than by how quickly the card could communicate with the system. So running at 1080p with some modern games we were able to create a scenario whereby the card was not actually the bottleneck in the performance of the system in that particular game. So the processors were able to do more than the PCI Express bandwidth was capable of communicating. So basically what we see here then is that as soon as PCIe 3.0 comes out we're probably looking at a scenario, remember PCI Express is doubling in bandwidth every time we see a new iteration, but we're probably looking at a scenario where any modern card will perform about like this at PCIe 3.04x and will perform about like this at PCIe 3.08x and then there will be a hypothetical probably like incremental.2 FPS beyond that. So for any modern card, and remember this is two modern high end GPUs, those are each 6970s on there, for any two modern high end GPUs PCIe 8x is pretty much enough and 16x is definitely enough based on how little improvement we see by doubling the bandwidth from PCIe 8x slot to a 16x slot. So thank you for checking out this episode of Linus Tech Tips, don't forget to subscribe for more unboxings, reviews and other computer videos.