A piece of code from AMD's latest Linux driver indicates that the company's upcoming Vega 20 graphics cards will come with support for the high-speed PCI-Express 4.0 interface.

The PCI-Express 3.0 interface has been around for quite some time now. Strangely enough, the eight-year-old standard has been holding up strong. Not even the current graphics cards on the market come close to saturating a PCI-Express 3.0 x16 slot. Nevertheless, the next-generation of graphics cards could possibly change that--or at least that's what AMD might be trying to tell us.

AMD's Vega 20 graphics cards were already the subject of numerous rumors, even before the company revealed one at Computex this year. One of those rumors was that the Vega 20 architecture could possibly make use of the latest PCI-Express 4.0 interface. Thanks to AMDGPU, AMD's open-source Linux graphics driver for Radeon graphics cards, it seems that rumor has some truth to it. A snippet of the driver revealed an entry that references to the recent PCI-Express 4.0 specification. So, the company's soon-to-be-released (at least we hope) Vega 20 graphics cards may be the first products on the market to exploit the PCI-Express 4.0 specification's attributes.

PCI-SIG officially finalized the PCI-Express 4.0 specification not so long ago. Among the specification's numerous advancements, it promised to deliver up to 16 GT/s (1.969 GB/s) of bandwidth per PCI-Express lane, doubling the previous PCI-Express 3.0's 8 GT/s (985 MB/s) bandwidth. Doing some simple math shows that a PCI-Express 4.0 x16 slot bears up to 31.51 GB/s of bandwidth--a massively wide pipe for pixel pushing. It will be interesting to see whether AMD's Vega 20 graphics card with its 32GB of HBM2 memory can effectively make a PCI-Express 4.0 x16 lane sweat.

Since cutting-edge technology normally takes a bit to proliferate, it might take a while before motherboards with PCI-Express 4.0 slots become vailable. Hopefully by the time AMD's Vega 20 graphics card is out, there is a motherboard capable of taking advantage of the new super-fast interface. Here's hoping we'll soon see a single card that's capable of pushing those new Asus and Acer 4K 144Hz monitors to their limits. Our eyes are ready--even if our wallets aren't.