Graphics cards have become one of the essential building blocks of Computers no matter the computers are for gaming purposes or any other since the Graphics cards are now developed to do much more than gaming.
The Graphics cards are the first devices to use the PCIe (Peripheral Component Interconnect Express) connection and a separate power supply in some cases to work because they require more power that the motherboard cannot provide. Their work requires the transfer of data in Gigabytes between the GPU chip itself, the CPU and the other parts of the computer, due to increased bandwidth provided by the PCIe.
It is considered that all components will require PCIe connections in the future. Many new SSDs that are much faster than the traditional SSDs require the PCIe connection to work so that they can provide the designated reads and writes speeds. The RAM that we use traditionally requires a PCI slot to work, but due to the increased benefits of the PCIe slot manufacturers are now making RAMs that require PCIe connections.
The PCIe slot has progressed over time, and most of the computers have the PCIe 3.0 slot in them that offers 8 GT/s bit-rate and 32 GB/s bandwidth with the x16 interface of PCIe express slot. Now PCIe 4.0 is coming, and according to latest Linux drivers, the engineers over Radeon Technology group are working on the Graphics card that will have the added compatibility of the PCIe 4.0 connection. The new connection will double the benefits from the older 3.0 connection as the bit-rate will become 16 GT/s and the 64 GB/s bandwidth with the x16 interface connection. The number game between AMD and the rival is going strong at the moment, and the company is getting ahead of the rivals at every competition first they announced the 7nm process for the GPUs and now the rumored Vega 20 series that may hit the market at the end of 2018, will have the PCIe 4.0 connection.
Developing for the PCIe 4.0 is hard and expensive, so we can expect that the Graphics cards that are built around the technology would not be for the common consumers at least anytime soon. The PCIe roadmap shows that the 4.0 slot should be very much “household” by now, but the cost of producing the motherboards and the devices are too high. Thus most of us are still using the PCIe 3.0 slot for the daily usage. Lastly, it seems like the VEGA 20 will be more of the machine learning, and data center specific device, according to the current rumors, the story will hopefully become black and white in the coming months.