Nvidia's RTX 4090 graphics card "confirmed" to have a power draw of 600W

[Kaapstad]

Really bad design.

If NVidia can not build a next gen card that has a TDP limit of 300W and still beats Ampere out of sight they need to hire some new Engineers and Designers.

 

[Avet]

Really bad design.

If NVidia can not build a next gen card that has a TDP limit of 300W and still beats Ampere out of sight they need to hire some new Engineers and Designers.

They don't have to because they don't have competition. AMD is kinda competing in raster games, but only in that.

If you want to stream NVENC is the only way.

If you want to do any proffesional work Nvidia is the only solution.

If you want to play RayTracing games Nvidia is the only solution.

And on top of all that they are on pair with AMD cards in raster and Nvidia cards are more available on shelves despite all the scalping.

 

[Dicehunter]

Really bad design.

If NVidia can not build a next gen card that has a TDP limit of 300W and still beats Ampere out of sight they need to hire some new Engineers and Designers.

As long as people keep buying their cards they will keep raising power usage and prices, Only thing that gets them to turn around on both fronts is people keeping their wallets closed.

 

[AngryGoldfish]

I could sort of see the logic in that if it were not for the fact that you simply will not get anywhere near enough for the asking price and cost to run.

There is a major difference between a Ford Fiesta and a R8. Literally everything. The weight, the handling, the power, the suspension. Every single part is completely different. You don't put that sort of horsepower in a horse and buggy.

The big problem here is that it's all the same game industry. IE, you aren't able to do anything that other people are not. Sure you can up the res a bit, turn on nice gritty ray tracing and etc but it won't make you enjoy the game any more. Where as a sports car allows you to enjoy the road and driving WAY more.

And that for me is the crux. After posting those old pics last night I got to thinking about the cost. Even then it was considered stupid over say an Xbox 360. Thing is though, certain games on the 360 were appalling. Like for example FONV. Sure it ran at 1080p but with no AA and frame drops into the single digits at times. So gaming on a PC made it (somewhat) worthwhile for the enormous visual upgrade.

IDK what planet people are living on but £2000 for a GPU is totally unacceptable. Especially when you consider that ten years ago that same elite tier GPU (usually with two dies on it !) cost less than a quarter. Now I know we've had inflation and all, but it just seems that due to the popularity of PCs and PC gaming over that ten year period (because ten years ago a PC gamer was a ginger step child) every company associated with it seem to be totally taking the pee. Like, ass ramming their buyers.

Like I said, the cost of living has not quadrupled over ten years. Nor has the price of new cars, clothes and etc. I mean sure it's all made to cheaper standards and total crap, but it has not sky rocketted. I just bought a 75" TV for £750. Half of what I paid for a 65" completely inferior set 9 years ago.

I don't know how all of this has managed to get past PC owners. Especially when they used to complain at paying £25 for a PC game that was terribly "ported", not optimised for a PC (let alone a £2000 GPU!) and really no different than the console version.

And that hasn't changed has it? Not one bit, unless you count RT. Which obviously doesn't even matter or AMD would not have sold a single Radeon. There's nothing new there. Not shading, not lighting, not AA - nothing. Not double to quadruple the resolution console gaming nor tons of PC exclusives that could possibly make a person high enough to even consider spending £2000 on a GPU.

A high end uber PC used to cost a grand or less. Now they want double that for the GPU alone, stupid prices for high end motherboards (which have also quadrupled in price due to popularity) and god knows what else.

If anything? it's sad that people even have enough disposable income to entertain these completely brainless ideas and purchases.

What game could you come on here and brag about now? Crysis - pmsl. Cyberpunk - lmfao.

No game on the planet is worth spending £2000 on a GPU for. No game. And mining? is so damaging in an eco sense given people are peeing power up the wall and now the power prices have gone insane. Now every one else needs to pay for those who lined their pockets mining. Nice one. Thing is? they won't even benefit because of inflation. Every penny they made will now be taken back as their currency devalues.

I can't even believe I spent £3000 on a PC over two years ago. God only knows what happened there, as I had sworn to stick to consoles. Maybe it was the delay and etc of the Xbox SEX? IDK. But that really is it. I have a gaming PC in two places I can play PUBG with my mates and it won't be long before I do get an Xbox and I will be back off the train.

It's all just so completely ridiculous, and there is no making sense or head nor tail of it. I wouldn't even mind but companies have become so greedy they are making GPUs and back plates out of plastic FFS. That Zalman cooler cost me £27 !!!! the whole thing was alu and it came with a huge alu fin plate for the VRMs etc. *AND* an offboard fan controller !!!!!

The car illustration was to illustrate the electricity bill issue, but I understand why you used the same car illustration to explain something else.

For sure, the returns are hugely diminished. In the PC world it seems that diminishing returns are a big factor.

But are we guaranteed to see a trickling down of that into the spaces that actually matter—the low-end and the midrange? Is a £2000-3000 graphics card going to mean that midrange is now £600-800 and high-end is £1000-1500? Not likely.

On top of that, if the rumours of Lovelace and RDNA3 are true, while prices have shifted up, performance will be shifted up in tandem with that more so than many previous generations, especially recent ones. Navi 33 could be priced at around £450, right? In the past it would have been £350. That's a huge price increase. As you said, inflation isn't that bad, and we could argue that neither are silicon shortages or shipping issues.

But what if Navi 33 at £450 is faster than a £1000 6900XT? That's like when the £300 GTX 970 was faster than the £700 780Ti. I see the issue with the price increase, absolutely, but I don't see an issue with the relationship to previous generations. The increase in performance is substantial enough to warrant a price increase, meaning the increase is relative. Maybe not as high, but that's where a little corporate greed, a touch of inflation, a sprinkling of covid, etc. all play their part. What you're saying is GREEEDDDDDD INFLATION COVIDDDDD DEATH BAD ITS ALL GONE TO POTTTTT, when in reality it's much more modest than that. It's only gone to pot in the absolute bleeding edge.

But then it goes back to my original thought: what does that matter?

I just want sane prices and power consumption in the mid-upper mid range. They can do whatever they want with higher end cards

This.

 

[Dawelio]

I just want sane prices and power consumption in the mid-upper mid range. They can do whatever they want with higher end cards

I've gotten a bit out of touch lately due to life etc, but what is considered "mid-upper mid range" really?...

 

[NeverBackDown]

I've gotten a bit out of touch lately due to life etc, but what is considered "mid-upper mid range" really?...

3070 pricing market area.

 

[Dawelio]

3070 pricing market area.

Gotcha, thanks!

 

[LePhuronn]

I'd suggest that Nvidia have hit a brick wall in how to actually design GPUs.

Fermi was a blip, and within 6 months they'd fixed the power and hit problems. Kepler wasn't all that hungry, Maxwell was a massive leap in performance for the same energy and Pascal was stellar. GTX 1080 with a single 8 pin? Wow.

Then Turing went a bit power hungry, but Nvidia were slapping a lot of new tech into the design whilst still using an older TSMC node. Fair enough, give them a pass.

Then Ampere's power draw goes through the roof, but even how much of that is from Samsung's rubbish "refined" 10nm node? Ampere built on TSMC 7nm comparatively sips power (A1000 cards are, what, half the power draw of the 3090?)

But what's the excuse now? RTX 4000 is supposedly on TSMC 5nm and yet we're still looking at 400-600W power use? Why? Are Nvidia incapable of creating efficient architectures now so they have to mimic AMD/ATI of old and smash stupid amounts of power into it just to be competitive?

Because this now continues a bad trend. The poor optics of Ampere's power requirements gave AMD a window to up RDNA 2's power limit to squeeze out a bit more performance. RDNA 2 on 7nm doesn't need that much power. RTX 4000 requiring 600W in some cases is just going to allow AMD to smash similar power through RDNA 3 on 5nm, which is just perpetuating a ty cycle for us consumers and adding yet another reason to just not buy a graphics card.

Could I afford a £700 GPU? I'd feel a little sick doing so, but I could just about do so. Can I afford an additional £150+ for a super powerful PSU and then the many monies a month in electricity bills just to run the card? No. So I either buy something much lower powered and sacrifice my gaming experience, or I don't by one at all.

 

[LePhuronn]

They don't have to because they don't have competition. AMD is kinda competing in raster games, but only in that.

Does anybody who plays games give 2 hoots about RT?

If you want to stream NVENC is the only way.

Never seen even a semi-professional streamer use NVEnc. It's all dedicated external boxes.

If you want to do any proffesional work Nvidia is the only solution.

Not even remotely true unless your workload is CUDA specific.

If you want to play RayTracing games Nvidia is the only solution.

Unless those games use vendor-agnostic or AMD-optimised RT techniques, then Radeon is easily a match (Godfall pops into my head). Radeon sucks at running Nvidia's RTX black box. But it's not like Nvidia cards are any good at RT either.

...Nvidia cards are more available on shelves despite all the scalping.

Not entirely true, depends where you look.

 

[AngryGoldfish]

Does anybody who plays games give 2 hoots about RT?


Never seen even a semi-professional streamer use NVEnc. It's all dedicated external boxes.


Not even remotely true unless your workload is CUDA specific.


Unless those games use vendor-agnostic or AMD-optimised RT techniques, then Radeon is easily a match (Godfall pops into my head). Radeon sucks at running Nvidia's RTX black box. But it's not like Nvidia cards are any good at RT either.


Not entirely true, depends where you look.

My brother and I were talking about this the other day. He's the biggest gamer that I know of. He told me about a time when he was trolling people on reddit regarding RT. What he found was that people that cared the most were ones who didn't actually care about gaming the most.


Regarding your other comment, we don't know exactly what Nvidia have in store for us. We're seeing headlines of 600-900W of power draw, but we don't know what they will amount to. We don't know the architecture yet. There could be something within the pipeline that wholly justifies it. This is why I'm excited to see Lovelace. I personally don't feel those 600W will go to boring old raster that only just competes with AMD and RT that no one cares about. I think there's more to it than that—but I can't prove it until the architecture is released.

 

[AlienALX]

Does anybody who plays games give 2 hoots about RT?

No. Absolutely not.

When I play on PC none of the titles we play are RT. Its PUBG nearly every evening of the week and then on Weds I plug into the LAN night my friends have and we play COD4, Insurgency and others including Serious Sam. None of them require fast hardware and it's all good fun.

PUBG on the other hand does demand much better hardware, though they all get by. But again there is no RT and certainly won't be in the future given its an online game and any heavy GPU features would trash your experience and just cause you to lose even more.

That said RT features on the GPU do have more uses. Well, the tensor cores.

 

[KingNosser]

I wouldn't say i don't care i like some of the DXR features but things like general shadows ect i'm not intrested in but anything partical related or something baked in couldn't do if done right can be nice, that doom mod is a nice little gem with the path tracing, but DXR has a fair ways to go before it's actually good and that's just on a visual level let alone the performance level that is going to take a fair amount of time longer to be stella.

there aren't enough DXR games to really worry about it but there are a few good ones just atm really few it's still even after a few years early days.

mainly reflections are the best part atm some are so so others really good.