Does the Nvidia RTX 4000 series support PCIe 5.0?

With PCI Express 5.0 (PCIe 5.0) support on Alder Lake, Raptor Lake, and AM5 I found myself asking do Nvidia’s latest cards such as the RTX 4080 and RTX 4090 support this new speedy interface? Looking on the official specs page it’s not immediately certain if they do or don’t support it as in the full specs for the GPU list “PCI Express Gen 4” as being supported with a “yes” as opposed to specifically mentioning which PCIe revision is supported why this is a little ambiguous is that PCIe is backwards compatible. So make sure it does not support PCIe 5.0 I checked the spec pages for 10 cards from 5 different manufacturers (including Nvidia’s Founders Edition cards) and not one supported PCIe 5.0.

The cards I checked

• Nvidia RTX 4090 Founders Edition – PCIe 4.0
• Nvidia RTX 4080 Founders Edition (Both 12GB and 16GB) – PCIe 4.0
• ASUS ROG Strix RTX 4090 OC and non-OC – PCIe 4.0
• ASUS ROG Strix RTX 4080 OC and non-OC – PCIe 4.0
• MSI RTX 4090 Suprim X – PCIe 4.0
• MSI RTX 4080 Suprim X – PCIe 4.0
• Gigabyte RTX 4090 XTREME WATERFORCE – PCIe 4.0
• Palit 4090 GameRock OC – PCIe 4.0

Can I use a PCIe 4.0 card in my PCIe 5.0 slot?

You certainly can, I’m doing it right now and have been for a few months. PCIe is backwards compatible, so generally speaking as long as you’ve got a suitable 16x slot (even an 8x slot is often ok too) it should be fine. The only down side of using PCIe 3.0 or older and/or a slot with less PCIe lanes is that sometimes performance may take a hit.

Conclusion

There was no inconsistency, all of them state PCIe 4.0 support so I think it’s quite reasonable to conclude that the majority of the cards at release will only support PCIe 4.0 and that all Nvidia RTX 4000 series cards may only support PCIe 4.0. If there are any changes to this I’ll of course update the article but at this point I think it’s reasonable to presume that they will only support PCIe 4.0.