PCIe Bandwidth Planning: How Much Net Bandwidth Can You Really Get from Gen3 x4 to x16?
The PCIe bandwidth bill is far more complex than the number on the datasheet—raw bandwidth, coding overhead, protocol overhead, DMA efficiency, and the DDR bottleneck each eat into that "16 GB/s". This article works through Gen3 x4/x8/x16, all the way to DDR and DMA matching, and gives a reusable method for estimating net bandwidth.