While there are still quite a few questions hanging over the upcoming RTX 40 and RDNA3 cards, AMD senior vice president Sam Naffziger’s recent appearance at VB regarding his company’s future products is cause for concern. Naffziger said that AMD’s GPUs and CPUs have benefited from big changes over the past few generations as the company tries to balance the demands of avid gamers, data center computing and the need to offer better energy efficiency especially when it comes to the performance per watt ration.
The performance per watt ratio is improving but the TGP continues to explode
Indeed, if from a techno point of view, the performance per watt ratio keeps improving, the competition and the demand for graphics power generate a surge in consumption that a good ratio cannot hide. Because clearly, for a few weeks, rumors have been suggesting an inflation of the TGP of the next cards. The next RTX 4090 which could be launched at the end of this year and which could swallow up to 600W is regularly mentioned. A consumption to put in parallel with the 3090 Ti and its “small” 450W.
Always more performance = always more power consumption
In his speech, Sam Naffziger talked about the evolution of graphics cards over the last few years. He mentions the dramatic increase in power consumption around 2018 but also a trajectory leading GPUs to 600W and then 700W before 2025. The main reason would clearly be the race for computing power and these figures could be exceeded much earlier. Indeed, AMD’s graph seems to be an average and therefore does not only concern high-end GPUs…Not really good news for the planet nor for our finances.
