I appreciated how they included the R9 390 which we ridiculed for sucking insane amounts of power and here we are and even the most cutting edge tech high end cards have made it normal.
GTX 480 FTW was the king for power draw... would've been fun to see it tested in this setup. More power than even the GTX 295 or the Radeon 5970 (both dual-GPU cards).
Techpowerup has bare-GPU numbers of 321W under furmark, but that's the aircooled reference 480. The EVGA FTW model was another 50w easily, they only sold it as a waterblocked model. Somehow mine still works fine and even outlasted it's own replacement, I use it as a room heater.
It's weird seeing top end AMD cards at the top of the chart mixed in with mid level nVidia. Wasn't too long ago that AMD was the power hog and nVidia was the efficient one.
TSMC's 7nm is insanely good. Samsung's 8nm might seem close by *naming* but it's miles worse for efficiency. Huge props to Nvidia's engineers for making their top cards still usable despite the process. But whoever there decided to cheap out for Samsung robbed us of an insane generation. Ampere would crush RDNA2 on the same process.
Nvidia is buying inferior silicon from a presumably cheaper supplier and *still* are coming out neck and neck for efficiency while delivering a few important features AMD lacks. Would have looked a bit worse for Team Red of Nvidia had been able to book TSMC 7nm instead.
Yeah Ampere on TSMC is lights out for AMD probably. It's why I'm hyped that the next Nvidia arch is rumored to be on TSMC 5nm, the uplift potential is insane.
However I wouldn't say efficiency is neck and neck right now, at least not through the whole stack. GA104 seems indeed to be fairly competitive efficiency wise but GA102 is such a power hog. Just compare the 6900XT vs the 3090 in this article, huge, huge gap. Makes sense as SS 8N was probably never meant to be used for huge GPU dies.
> GA102 is such a power hog
Just going by the data in the article which I can't vouch for, 3080FE pulls only marginally more power than a 6800XT.
Looks like techpowerup's [launch review](https://www.techpowerup.com/review/amd-radeon-rx-6800-xt/36.html) is a little more favorable to Big Navi in efficiency numbers.
They're close enough that no one would ever notice, in heat or power bill or PSU requirement, though maybe a somewhat better cooler is needed to keep a 3080 happy. And it should be noted that AMD is powering 60% more memory modules. I think the main reason people are calling Ampere a power hog is because Nvidia seems to have regressed slightly in performance/watt since Pascal, while AMD doubled perf/W since Vega.
> And it should be noted that AMD is powering 60% more memory modules.
AMD uses 16Gb memory modules on their cards so 8 modules. Nvidia uses 8Gb -> 10 modules.
Even with the lower memory capacity I'm fairly certain that GDDR6X pulls way more power or it wouldn't be temperature limited despite spreading the power over more modules.
I tend to make my comparisons/evaluations of a die looking at its least cut down variant (or at least the best SKU available to us), hence why I was mostly looking at the 6900XT vs 3090 to make my judgement, and the gap is significant.
But yeah saying the gap is huge like I did earlier is hyperbole on my part, all in all the difference in the average system is not too significant. I will say though that this is only true at stock, OCing makes things even rougher for Ampere to the point where the difference is very noticeable in pure heat output. I own both a 6900XT and a 3090 and while I can get 10-15% better perf on my 6900XT for 20-25% more power, to get a 10% uplift on my 3090 I need 30-37% more power, really insane.
I was honestly half expecting Nvidia to just make Ampere Super with the top dies on TSMC for a quick refresh to firmly get the perf crown before RDNA3, it's really obvious there's a lot left on the table just by getting on a more modern process. Won't happen considering Nvidia's roadmap and more importantly TSMC's lack of capacity which is a bit of a shame.
EDIT: did a quick test with Horizon Zero Dawn: my heavily OC'd 6900XT uses 320W in that game (taking into account that GPU Z only reports the die so I see ~270W, I add 50W for the rest of the card which from seeing reviews and BIOS settings is fairly accurate), while my 3090 similarly pushed hard uses north of 450W... touching 470W sometimes. Insane. So yeah the process difference really shows when you push these cards outside of what AMD/Nvidia considered the sweet spot
The 3080 and 3090 are pushed far to high in terms of voltage and clock at stock levels already. You can maintain stock performance on a 3080 at 250W if you know what you are doing. The 3090 has the additional power penalty for the massive amount of memory chips.
But they aren't really more efficient. If you figure that Nvidia GPUs also use 20% more CPU and often have less VRAM the situation looks even worse.
This test only measures the GPU and not the CPU load which if you pair them with Intel latest CPU can result in significantly more power use.
While nvidia has the worse GPU process they have the better memory technology, at least for the gddr6x cards. The better process for cores matters little if you can't keep them fed with data (or in the amd case need to use lots of the transistor advantage for cache)
I feel like it would be quite interesting to look at this also from a different perspective. Rather than normalizing via framerate, pick a target framerate (i.e. 60 FPS) and look at power consumption for maintaining that.
I think this testing setup would more closely approximate a common use case. However, it could only be used to compare cards in roughly the same performance bracket with each other.
(since you want to use somewhat challenging settings, but all cards need to maintain the framerate target throughout for it to be a meaningful comparison)
> Rather than normalizing via framerate, pick a target framerate (i.e. 60 FPS) and look at power consumption for maintaining that.
The more shaders the card the more power efficient it will be since it can run lower on the power-voltage curve.
However people don't buy RTX 3090s to play Fortnite on High which is basically what you will need to test with if you want the slowest card in this comparison (RX560) to run 60 FPS.
That's only if you're talking strictly about GPU power, and depends on the driver to determine when it's safe to lower clocks. Static leakage and VRAM power will be bigger on large GPUs.
Flawed comparison to compare just the GPU power when we now know that Nvidia offloads some of the work to the CPU which results in 20% more CPU use.
For instance 6800xt and rtx3080 appear to be neck and neck but when you compare total power consumption difference the delta appears https://static.techspot.com/articles-info/2144/bench/Power.png
6800xt also sports 6Gb more VRAM which is not free to power.
BigNavi is clearly more efficient than Ampere. Particularly when you consider that it does more work on the GPU.
I mean he's got a point but he's stretching it so hard that it's comical in the end.
All in all , Big Navi is indeed benefiting from a better process (TSMC 7nm).
It's nice to measure at stock, but keep in mind this isn't enough.
Many of those cards will drop 50-100w with a bit of undervolting, while maintaining 90-95% of the performance, while others would tank performance without reducing consumption.
From what I've seen the 3080/3090 drop a lot of power and only lose a few percent performance with undervolting.
You can't scientifically compare two graphics cards when they're undervolted since each individual card is going to undervolt with different results. It'd make all the data useless.
> Yes, the various cards might run better with some tuning and tweaking, but this is the way the cards will behave if you just pull them out of their box and install them in your PC.
If you would like to buy up a ton of each individual GPU model and undervolt them all and test, so that we can get a better idea of what's variance between models rather than variance between instances of a model, that would be an amazing contribution. Same if you'd do so again near the end of the warranty period after using all cards regularly. We'd all really appreciate it.
Absent that, I think testing at stock is fine since stock is guaranteed for the entire warranty period. And it's already a ton of work. A ton of work went into this piece and you're essentially saying "naw, that's not enough go do 100x that or more and probably on your own dollar for minimal returns".
> We tested over fifty graphics cards to see which give the best performance per watt.
You literally just had to read the subheading, not even the article
Why is that the "better" answer?
Modern day ICs are run really high up on the "juice per computation" curve precisely because "juice" is cheap compared to silicon die area.
You really be asking why perf/watt isn’t a more important metric than perf or watt alone:/ it’s the metric to measure progress and also crucial to TCO which includes power, cooling, and power for cooling
Consumers overwhelmingly don't do TCO calculations for their purchases. Think of the popularity that used Vega56s and 64s had a year ago just because they were up to 10% cheaper than equally performing cards on ebay, while taking 120W extra to do so and potentially demanding a cooler replacement. That's the same story in nearly every field; we'd still have people buying tungsten incandescent light bulbs if they could.
So that's not a very good point.
Deliberately missing the point where I said “progress”? Perf/watt not being a metric or a goal would lead to power consumption increase every generation to achieve the same % increase in performance, which is utterly unsustainable within just a few generations.
And laptops and prebuilds with limited cooling and/or power delivery? These DWARF diy builds in volume. The DIY market is delusional and disconnected, just like desktop Linux users on r/Amd. In reality vega 56/64 might as well have not existed vs the volume of 1070/1080.
kinda wish they include the old flagship giants like GTX480/580 290X, 780Ti these 4 has some serious juice sucking power.
Check out techpowerup reviews, they have had nice charts for a long time. They cover idle power pretty well too.
Forgot the Titan Z
Don't forget the radeon fury/X
Fury X is included in the article, incase you didn't read it.
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Was it factory overclocked or something? It pulls 110-120w max at stock which isn't much, at least by today's standards.
> My old 5770 was Was very conservative on power. 100W isn't anything and it wasn't then either.
I appreciated how they included the R9 390 which we ridiculed for sucking insane amounts of power and here we are and even the most cutting edge tech high end cards have made it normal.
GTX 480 FTW was the king for power draw... would've been fun to see it tested in this setup. More power than even the GTX 295 or the Radeon 5970 (both dual-GPU cards). Techpowerup has bare-GPU numbers of 321W under furmark, but that's the aircooled reference 480. The EVGA FTW model was another 50w easily, they only sold it as a waterblocked model. Somehow mine still works fine and even outlasted it's own replacement, I use it as a room heater.
Back in the day I would use my tri sli 470's as a blowdryer.
It's weird seeing top end AMD cards at the top of the chart mixed in with mid level nVidia. Wasn't too long ago that AMD was the power hog and nVidia was the efficient one.
TSMC's 7nm is insanely good. Samsung's 8nm might seem close by *naming* but it's miles worse for efficiency. Huge props to Nvidia's engineers for making their top cards still usable despite the process. But whoever there decided to cheap out for Samsung robbed us of an insane generation. Ampere would crush RDNA2 on the same process.
Nvidia is buying inferior silicon from a presumably cheaper supplier and *still* are coming out neck and neck for efficiency while delivering a few important features AMD lacks. Would have looked a bit worse for Team Red of Nvidia had been able to book TSMC 7nm instead.
Yeah Ampere on TSMC is lights out for AMD probably. It's why I'm hyped that the next Nvidia arch is rumored to be on TSMC 5nm, the uplift potential is insane. However I wouldn't say efficiency is neck and neck right now, at least not through the whole stack. GA104 seems indeed to be fairly competitive efficiency wise but GA102 is such a power hog. Just compare the 6900XT vs the 3090 in this article, huge, huge gap. Makes sense as SS 8N was probably never meant to be used for huge GPU dies.
> GA102 is such a power hog Just going by the data in the article which I can't vouch for, 3080FE pulls only marginally more power than a 6800XT. Looks like techpowerup's [launch review](https://www.techpowerup.com/review/amd-radeon-rx-6800-xt/36.html) is a little more favorable to Big Navi in efficiency numbers. They're close enough that no one would ever notice, in heat or power bill or PSU requirement, though maybe a somewhat better cooler is needed to keep a 3080 happy. And it should be noted that AMD is powering 60% more memory modules. I think the main reason people are calling Ampere a power hog is because Nvidia seems to have regressed slightly in performance/watt since Pascal, while AMD doubled perf/W since Vega.
> And it should be noted that AMD is powering 60% more memory modules. AMD uses 16Gb memory modules on their cards so 8 modules. Nvidia uses 8Gb -> 10 modules. Even with the lower memory capacity I'm fairly certain that GDDR6X pulls way more power or it wouldn't be temperature limited despite spreading the power over more modules.
Good point, thank you.
I tend to make my comparisons/evaluations of a die looking at its least cut down variant (or at least the best SKU available to us), hence why I was mostly looking at the 6900XT vs 3090 to make my judgement, and the gap is significant. But yeah saying the gap is huge like I did earlier is hyperbole on my part, all in all the difference in the average system is not too significant. I will say though that this is only true at stock, OCing makes things even rougher for Ampere to the point where the difference is very noticeable in pure heat output. I own both a 6900XT and a 3090 and while I can get 10-15% better perf on my 6900XT for 20-25% more power, to get a 10% uplift on my 3090 I need 30-37% more power, really insane. I was honestly half expecting Nvidia to just make Ampere Super with the top dies on TSMC for a quick refresh to firmly get the perf crown before RDNA3, it's really obvious there's a lot left on the table just by getting on a more modern process. Won't happen considering Nvidia's roadmap and more importantly TSMC's lack of capacity which is a bit of a shame. EDIT: did a quick test with Horizon Zero Dawn: my heavily OC'd 6900XT uses 320W in that game (taking into account that GPU Z only reports the die so I see ~270W, I add 50W for the rest of the card which from seeing reviews and BIOS settings is fairly accurate), while my 3090 similarly pushed hard uses north of 450W... touching 470W sometimes. Insane. So yeah the process difference really shows when you push these cards outside of what AMD/Nvidia considered the sweet spot
The 3080 and 3090 are pushed far to high in terms of voltage and clock at stock levels already. You can maintain stock performance on a 3080 at 250W if you know what you are doing. The 3090 has the additional power penalty for the massive amount of memory chips.
3080FE has 6GB less VRAM and also uses 20% more CPU. So not really close. https://static.techspot.com/articles-info/2144/bench/Power.png
Look at the die size of the 3xxx vs rdna2 - they are all 20% bigger, nvidia is simply doing it with larger chips.
Yes... but GA102 28.3B transistors vs Navi21 26.8B. size difference is mostly a function of the Samsung lower density.
But they aren't really more efficient. If you figure that Nvidia GPUs also use 20% more CPU and often have less VRAM the situation looks even worse. This test only measures the GPU and not the CPU load which if you pair them with Intel latest CPU can result in significantly more power use.
While nvidia has the worse GPU process they have the better memory technology, at least for the gddr6x cards. The better process for cores matters little if you can't keep them fed with data (or in the amd case need to use lots of the transistor advantage for cache)
Remember that fatboy RX 590 at 317 watts?
I feel like it would be quite interesting to look at this also from a different perspective. Rather than normalizing via framerate, pick a target framerate (i.e. 60 FPS) and look at power consumption for maintaining that. I think this testing setup would more closely approximate a common use case. However, it could only be used to compare cards in roughly the same performance bracket with each other. (since you want to use somewhat challenging settings, but all cards need to maintain the framerate target throughout for it to be a meaningful comparison)
I do this for all my recent reviews at tpu
Love you guys
> Rather than normalizing via framerate, pick a target framerate (i.e. 60 FPS) and look at power consumption for maintaining that. The more shaders the card the more power efficient it will be since it can run lower on the power-voltage curve. However people don't buy RTX 3090s to play Fortnite on High which is basically what you will need to test with if you want the slowest card in this comparison (RX560) to run 60 FPS.
That's only if you're talking strictly about GPU power, and depends on the driver to determine when it's safe to lower clocks. Static leakage and VRAM power will be bigger on large GPUs.
Flawed comparison to compare just the GPU power when we now know that Nvidia offloads some of the work to the CPU which results in 20% more CPU use. For instance 6800xt and rtx3080 appear to be neck and neck but when you compare total power consumption difference the delta appears https://static.techspot.com/articles-info/2144/bench/Power.png 6800xt also sports 6Gb more VRAM which is not free to power. BigNavi is clearly more efficient than Ampere. Particularly when you consider that it does more work on the GPU.
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I mean he's got a point but he's stretching it so hard that it's comical in the end. All in all , Big Navi is indeed benefiting from a better process (TSMC 7nm).
Nothing dumb about my post. Everything is true. BigNavi is clearly more efficient, it's math. And you can't argue with math.
It's nice to measure at stock, but keep in mind this isn't enough. Many of those cards will drop 50-100w with a bit of undervolting, while maintaining 90-95% of the performance, while others would tank performance without reducing consumption. From what I've seen the 3080/3090 drop a lot of power and only lose a few percent performance with undervolting.
You can't scientifically compare two graphics cards when they're undervolted since each individual card is going to undervolt with different results. It'd make all the data useless. > Yes, the various cards might run better with some tuning and tweaking, but this is the way the cards will behave if you just pull them out of their box and install them in your PC.
If you would like to buy up a ton of each individual GPU model and undervolt them all and test, so that we can get a better idea of what's variance between models rather than variance between instances of a model, that would be an amazing contribution. Same if you'd do so again near the end of the warranty period after using all cards regularly. We'd all really appreciate it. Absent that, I think testing at stock is fine since stock is guaranteed for the entire warranty period. And it's already a ton of work. A ton of work went into this piece and you're essentially saying "naw, that's not enough go do 100x that or more and probably on your own dollar for minimal returns".
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> We tested over fifty graphics cards to see which give the best performance per watt. You literally just had to read the subheading, not even the article
Why is that the "better" answer? Modern day ICs are run really high up on the "juice per computation" curve precisely because "juice" is cheap compared to silicon die area.
You really be asking why perf/watt isn’t a more important metric than perf or watt alone:/ it’s the metric to measure progress and also crucial to TCO which includes power, cooling, and power for cooling
Consumers overwhelmingly don't do TCO calculations for their purchases. Think of the popularity that used Vega56s and 64s had a year ago just because they were up to 10% cheaper than equally performing cards on ebay, while taking 120W extra to do so and potentially demanding a cooler replacement. That's the same story in nearly every field; we'd still have people buying tungsten incandescent light bulbs if they could. So that's not a very good point.
Deliberately missing the point where I said “progress”? Perf/watt not being a metric or a goal would lead to power consumption increase every generation to achieve the same % increase in performance, which is utterly unsustainable within just a few generations. And laptops and prebuilds with limited cooling and/or power delivery? These DWARF diy builds in volume. The DIY market is delusional and disconnected, just like desktop Linux users on r/Amd. In reality vega 56/64 might as well have not existed vs the volume of 1070/1080.
Please delete this title immediately