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I thought that eGPUs work through stuff like thunderbolt, where you're basically using a PCI Express port, so the slowness would only come from the length of cables relative to an internal GPU?

Or is this a misunderstanding on my part

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Slowness is also due to thunderbolt being PCIe x4 as opposed to x16 - x4 has a fourth of the bandwidth. Games however don't max out x16 usually, so you'd lose about 25%.

I thought for sure you'd be wrong, but nope!

https://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/NVIDIA/GeForce_GTX_1080_...

My theory would be that most of the transfer is about assets and games have more of a memory constraint rather than a bandwidth constraint in that space

I think it’s the other way around. Assets are loaded at initialization anyhow.

Used to be the case but most open-world games stream in assets nowadays and you can see the lower resolution assets fade out as the higher fidelity assets finish loading on the fly.

In games that want to load fast loading a save game might drop you into a pretty low fidelity world and then start loading in the higher res assets.

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