#Graphics #cards #Oculink #slower
A few years ago when Thunderbolt 3 became popular, external graphics cards suddenly became viable and external chassis with PCI-Express 3.0 slots appeared from many manufacturers. What started as a way for Mac users to be able to upgrade the crappy built-in graphics in Apple’s machines of the time.
Since then, the development of Thunderbolt has been more or less at a standstill, although Thunderbolt 5 is now finally on its way and promises significantly increased speeds. A few companies last year started making laptops with an alternative to Thunderbolt that was previously only used on server motherboards: Oculink.
Oculink provides up to 64 Gbit/s transfers, roughly 50 percent more than Thunderbolt 3 and 4 whose ceiling is 40 Gbit/s. In modern games and programs that often push the graphics memory with large textures and data to be processed, bandwidth is more important than before, so it is interesting to see how fast modern graphics cards are when connected via the connector. It has been tested by Chinese Golden Pig Upgrade (via Videocardz).
Golden Pig Upgrade tested both the new RTX 4070 Ti Super and RTX 4090 in 3DMark’s Time Spy test, partly directly in a desktop computer and partly in an external dock with Oculink connection. The cheaper card was 9.8 percent slower via Oculink, while the more expensive card was between 0 and 22.6 percent. The difference was significantly lower with Time Spy’s “Extreme” settings, with no difference at all on an external display connected directly to the graphics card and 5.2 percent on the laptop’s internal display. With default settings, the difference was 16.6 and 22.6 percent, respectively.
When Hothardware tested the RTX 4090 connected via Thunderbolt, the result in Time Spy was 32 percent lower than directly via PCI-Express. This means that Oculink appears to be 15-20 percent faster than Thunderbolt 3/4.
