AMD’s Radeon boss has talked about the RDNA 3 GPU power efficiency, 12VHPWR on Radeon RX 7000 GPUs & ray tracing capabilities.
The interview is very detailed and we would like you to visit Club386 and read the full thing here but some interesting comments were made regarding a few aspects of the RDNA 3 “Radeon RX 7000” GPU family and what we can expect in the coming generation.
Back when AMD was in the process of launching its RDNA 3 GPU architecture, the company promised a monumental +54% increase in power efficiency vs. RDNA 2 GPUs through the use of chiplets and other changes. However, the launch saw little gains in the efficiency department, all the while NVIDIA took their efficiency to a whole new level with the Ada GPU architecture. Scott says that AMD believes in offering good performance per watt across their GPU lineup & that it matters more on the notebook front. So far, AMD has only introduced its non-chiplet Navi 33 to laptops.
I’m inclined to agree as well, although I do think energy efficiency is environmentally important and the solution shouldn’t be to throw more power at the hardware. For that reason I do appreciate some middleground between the two.
Realistically, my friends 7900XTX compared to my 3080 are within the same power consumption under load but he has 24GB of VRAM where I do not. To get that there with NVIDIA needs an extra 150 watts for the 4090 or 3090. Regardless of performance elsewhere, that’s pretty sizeable, so it would be a shame to potentially lose that in place of something like a 30GB VRAM card pushing 450 watts from AMD.