Digital Home Thoughts: Faster Than a Speeding Video Card

"First Bluetooth, then USB and now PCI Express. It's clearly the era of version 3.0, and given that the PCI Express specification has been humming along at 2.0 speeds for over two years now, we'd say an update was definitely due. Thankfully, the PCI-SIG has announced the availability of the PCIe Base 3.0 specification to its members today, and the highlights are certainly notable."

Video cards are hungry beasts. Over the years, they have grown from being happy with a tiny bit of bandwidth to now wanting data as fast as you can feed it. No doubt, the theoretical 32GB/s for a PCI-e x16 slot should be enough for at least a year or two. Who needs that speed? Well, video games can no doubt benefit, but I suspect that there are other uses, such as improved GPGPU applications. With photos and video editing at HD levels taking a lot of number-crunching power, the extra bandwidth could definitely help.