PCI Express Gen 3.0 Motherboards Pointless Even with Radeon HD 7970

Apparently the folks over AT don't agree with you !
http://www.anandtech.com/show/5264/sandy-bridge-e-x79-pcie-30-it-works

Actually, they sort of do. They say that the HD 7970 showed a performance increase of 9% with gen 3.0 enabled, but only on that AMD AES Encrypt/Decrypt sample application. You probably missed where they said above that "The extra bandwidth of PCIe 3.0 wasn't expected to make any tangible difference in gaming performance and in our 7970 tests, it didn't."

Gen 3.0 may get a use in 2012-2013, but it doesn't do much of anything right now, except provide a bandwidth that no games or other consumer programs have any use for. It will probably catch on with the supercomputing crowd before games and other consumer software reach the point where they need it.

My point exactly, the fact is PCIe 3.0 is a sort of generational leap as in not only does it offer twice the bandwidth but the performance hit is reduced greatly by 128/130b encoding. The main problem would be utilizing the above said gains as even current gen GPU's don't scale that well neither do they fully tap the potential of PCIe 2.1 except multi GPU setups that handle GTX 590/Radeon 6990 type of raw power. This will also depend on the games however as AT pointed out that with the GPGPU world evolving we'll probably see the gains reflected on compute side first, that's what I was trying to say that since graphics/games developers don't utilize multi CPU cores nor fully tap the GPU's latent HP so the first real benefit from PCIe 3.0 would probably be in the HPC & general computing side (:

P.S. It'd seem that game & software developers in general are lazy & don't like to further enhance their products with the current gen available technology around the world as proven time & again by various benchmarks ):

I think it has to do with how games have had to sort of lag behind in terms of system requirements, because many games are made for consoles nowadays, which are much weaker than high-end PCs. Also, games seem to be very visually realistic already, so there isn't much room for graphics to sharpen before our eyes can no longer tell the difference when playing, say, Elder Scrolls VI (if it ever appears) on a regular, run off the mill 19-23-inch monitor (even Full HD or higher).

And since games themselves aren't lunging at big system specs, the programs used to make them don't have to jump forward too fast either.

Gen 3.0 will probably become truly relevant when SuperHD resolutions, like 4K4K, start to spread around. I can imagine that high-end systems with multi-monitor setups will put it to work well enough, especially if owners get an extra incentive to drive graphics as high as possible by getting particularly big displays. Too bad only TVs seem to be nearing 90-inch diagonals. Alas.