Tests Show NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5060 Ti 8GB Performs Even Worse With PCIe 4.0 Motherboards

The usual consensus which goes that NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5060 Ti’s 8GB variant is worse than the 16GB is down to the capacity, which won’t fit all of a game’s texture data, but there’s another factor at play here: having PCIe 4.0 signaling – still commonplace on most motherboards – will cost even more performance on the 8GB card, as discovered by ComputerBase (via Videocardz).

Pairing RTX 5060 Ti 8GB With PCIe 4.0

The results presented by the publication shows varying results between the 8GB card using PCIe 5.0 signaling versus the same card on PCIe 4.0 signaling, which range from identical performance to, in extreme cases, completely unplayable (i.e. Dragon Age: The Veilguard shows 34 FPS average on PCIe 5.0, down to 4.8 FPS on PCIe 4.0). All told, the PCIe 4.0 accounted for almost 13% loss in performance on average, on top of the losses compared to the 16GB card.

The reason behind the additional loss in performance has to do with the lack of VRAM capacity, as PCIe bus will get busier transmitting texture data between VRAM and storage, thus creating a performance bottleneck; as such, it is unlikely for the 16GB version of the RTX 5060 Ti to see this issue affecting its performance, as shown in the charts above.

ComputerBase also stressed that while PCIe 4.0 can make some games unplayable, the nature of the 8GB card itself means some games will be unplayable regardless of which PCIe standard it runs on. Simply put, 8GB VRAM is not enough to run modern games, and it’s best to avoid cards of this nature entirely in this day and age.

Pokdepinion: It just doesn’t look good for the 8GB card at all.