I am sure lots of the gamers and PC enthusiasts out there remember when we moved from the AGP slot over to the first PCIe slot. The performance improvement coming from an AGP video card to the PCIe cars was very impressive. Later the PCIe 2.0 slot came out with about twice the bandwidth of the original and again brought video cards that had more performance. Now there is a new specification for PCIe that is ready to be downloaded by PCI-SIG members.

The new specification is PCIe 3.0 is backwards compatible with PCIe and PCIe 2.0 devices so your old cards will work with the new spec once it starts showing up on the market. The 3.0 specification has a new 128b/130b encoding scheme and has a data transfer rate of 8GT/s. The original PCIe spec has 2.5GT/s and the PCIe 2.0 spec has 5GT/s transfer rates.

According to the PCI-SIG the 3.0 spec has bandwidth of about 1GB/s in one direction on an x1 slot and can scale up to 32GB/s on an x16 slot commonly used for graphics cards. More bandwidth should mean that the video cards could offer gamers more performance for their favorite games. The new spec also has a number of other enhancements.

"The PCI-SIG remains dedicated to I/O innovation and we are proud to release the PCIe 3.0 specification to our members," said Al Yanes, PCI-SIG chairman and president. "The PCIe 3.0 architecture details significant improvements over our two previous PCIe specifications, providing our members with the performance and functionality they need to continue to be innovators in their fields."