AMD's upcoming Navi 31 high-end GPUs could be the first gaming models to feature PCIe 5.0 support

AMD is certainly playing catch-up when it comes to offering PCIe 5.0 slots on the upcoming AM5 motherboards for Zen 4 processors. Intel’s Z690 chipsets have been featuring PCIe 5.0 support since late 2021, but the motherboards are still quite expensive and there is no real use for the new slots as there are no consumer PCIe 5.0 GPUs. This could, however, change in late 2022, when AMD and Nvidia are expected to launch new GPU generations. It is still unclear if Nvidia’s Ada Lovelace cards will offer PCIe 5.0 support, but, according to the latest AMD’s GFX11 architecture patches discovered by Twitter user Kepler_L2, Team Red could steal the show and provide PCIe 5.0 support for its upcoming Radeon RX 7000 cards before Nvidia's RTX 4000-series launch.

GFX11 is codename for Navi 31 GPU based on the upcoming RDNA3 architecture. As with previous releases, new leaks and confirmations come with open source Linux patches deployed by AMD. Apart from finding new details about the stream processor count for the Navi 3x cards, Kepler_L2 also uncovered pieces of code pointing to PCIe 5.0 support. This goes hand in hand with AMD’s recent confirmation that the new AM5 motherboards would support PCIe 5.0.

For now, only the high-end Navi 31 model is slated to support the PCIe 5.0 standard. Nevertheless, AMD might gimp the Navi 32 and 33 models just like it did with the Navi 22 and 23 models that are limited to fewer PCIe lanes. According to a tweet from RedGamingTech, the mid-range Navi 32 models would still feature full 16 lane support, but the Navi 33 lower-end cards might still be limited to 8 lanes.

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