Gaming off x1 pci-e slot

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hajalie24

[H]ard|Gawd
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Dec 22, 2010
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In case anyone is wondering I did a quick test and it seems to work fine on a 7970.
 
PCI-e is backwards compatible. No surprise here, you'll just lose a ton of bandwidth and performance.
 
I just mean performance wise it seemed pretty good and I'm not sure if I'm even missing out on much performance.

Basically, just posting this because I see a lot of posts saying gaming off a x1 slot is terrible and idiotic to do, blah blah blah.
 
hajalie24 said:
I just mean performance wise it seemed pretty good and I'm not sure if I'm even missing out on much performance.

Basically, just posting this because I see a lot of posts saying gaming off a x1 slot is terrible and idiotic to do, blah blah blah.
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the only way really its to make benchmark.. with x16 vs x1.. you will see numbers low for sure in x1 most even.. with multi GPU that why most people ask about using a pci-e X1 to have multiple gpu with enough space between cards..
 
You lose memory bandwidth, so the higher the resolution and the larger the textures the worse the performance.

The GPU can work full speed at x1 but the memory is being held back a lot.
 
What game, settings, resolution, CPU/system specs, and benchmarks? At relevant settings and games, I can't believe performance would be good.
 
Just did a quick test using the benchmark in Batman Arkham City, 2500k and 1440p monitor, all settings almost maxed (aa was set to fxaa (high) , accidentally left vsync on and dx11 off but will try again.

Minimum: 44
max: 60
Average: 59

EDIT: Okay, completely maxed out but 4x AA, these are the settings.




Min: 28
Max: 84
Ave: 64
 
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The game should run at almost the same FPS on any PCI-e, any game that is streaming tons of assets and large textures is probably going to have a lot of popping in and low resolution textures that take extra long to load.

The only want to really compare it would be side by side videos.
 
Was this pci-e 2.0? Or 3.0? Why would you bother taking a screen shot of the configuration settings, but not the benchmark results?
 
Because its a lot easier to take a screenshot of the cfg settings than to write down each setting. The benchmark result just gives you the min max and average framerate.

Its PCIe 2.0
 
hajalie24 said:
Because its a lot easier to take a screenshot of the cfg settings than to write down each setting. The benchmark result just gives you the min max and average framerate.

Its PCIe 2.0
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That's the clincher; min, max, and average values say nothing about playability and consistency, which is what most concerned about when asking about performance (and why good benchmark programs give the full results for all the rendered frames). I don't care about the extreme and average frames per second, they say nothing about consistency and whether a game actually playable.

It won't be good gameplay on modern graphically demanding games with relevant graphical settings ON Pci-e 2.0 x1
 
Why even bother doing this? It's not like anyone is going to do it unless they're running 6 cards in a mining rig.
 
teh_chem said:
That's the clincher; min, max, and average values say nothing about playability and consistency, which is what most concerned about when asking about performance (and why good benchmark programs give the full results for all the rendered frames). I don't care about the extreme and average frames per second, they say nothing about consistency and whether a game actually playable.

It won't be good gameplay on modern graphically demanding games with relevant graphical settings ON Pci-e 2.0 x1
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Well, I already said everything was playable and running well. Saints Row The Third was running fine and the first game I tested, I just ran the AC benchmark because it actually gives numbers. If you have suggestions on what to run let me know.

failwheeldrive said:
Why even bother doing this? It's not like anyone is going to do it unless they're running 6 cards in a mining rig.
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I'm doing this because I also have 3 290s in this rig mining, running off the 7970 allows me to use the desktop smoothly because 7970s only need a low intensity while mining.

I figured the info would be useful for others in this situation or if for some reason someone has a motherboard with no x16 slot or if it isn't working. When googling if gaming on x1 would work fine there's just a bunch of replies saying it would be terrible but when I tried it myself what do you know it actually works fine.
 
Been playing on x1 since I need my cards to ran cooler. Only performance hit I've seen so far is playing BF4 on big maps(Siege of Shanghai). From 100 fps drops to around 30~40fps. While if you're a locker room player it's pretty much stable at 70fps. Dota2 is pretty much stable at 60fps.
 
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