If you're in the market for one of the latest graphics cards — Nvidia's RTX 50 or AMD's RX 90 — you might be worried about your motherboard supporting the PCIe generation of your GPU. Both the Blackwell and RDNA 4 series support PCIe 5.0 speeds, which means they're capable of accessing the 32 GT/s link speed of the PCIe 5.0 interface. However, if your motherboard doesn't have a PCIe 5.0 slot for the GPU, it's not the end of the world.

The bandwidth available to the PCIe connection doubled from PCIe 3.0 to PCIe 4.0, and then again to PCIe 5.0, but the real-world performance of graphics cards doesn't scale in the same way. Your brand-new PCIe 5.0 graphics card will not only work on your old motherboard, but the performance "loss" will also be negligible. PCIe 5.0 has more to do with Gen5 SSDs than GPUs at the moment, so you can lay your PCIe-related fears to rest.

One of the reasons not to get too worried about the various PCIe standards is that each PCIe generation is backward compatible with the ones that came before. This means that PCIe 5.0 GPUs don't need a PCIe 5.0 to work; they can run perfectly fine on PCIe 4.0 and PCIe 3.0 slots as well. An RTX 50 or RX 90 graphics card will work on your older motherboard with a PCIe 4.0 (or PCIe 3.0) slot, except it will be limited by the slot's maximum bandwidth.