Efficiency and power requirements for the upcoming Nvidia RTX 40-series and AMD Radeon 7000 ranges of GPUs have been constantly brought up in rumors surrounding these next-gen boards — and for good reason.
Speculation surrounding the wattage amount for Nvidia’s boards (ranging from 450 watts to an unprecedented 900 watts) has justifiably raised eyebrows, while reports regarding AMD’s Radeon 7000 cards point toward a more efficient powerhouse. But even Team Red has now admitted that we will indeed see a jump in power levels for its cards as well.
As reported by Tom’s Hardware and VideoCardz, the former’s interview with an AMD senior vice president, Sam Naffziger, revealed some interesting tidbits in regard to the power-consumption levels for the Radeon 7000 -series.
For reference, Naffziger is an extremely experienced product technology architect, who was on the AMD team responsible for the company’s chiplet architecture.
He emphasized that as its rivals boost the power consumption requirements for its GPUs, AMD will also follow suit in similar fashion.
“The demand for gaming and compute performance is, if anything, just accelerating, and at the same time, the underlying process technology is slowing down pretty dramatically — and the improvement rate.
So the power levels are just going to keep going up. Now, we’ve got a multiyear road map of very significant efficiency improvements to offset that curve, but the trend is there.
“Performance is king, but even if our designs are more power-efficient, that doesn’t mean you don’t push power levels up if the competition is doing the same thing. It’s just that they’ll have to push them a lot higher than we will.”
Either way, it’s no surprise that we’re in line for a sizable jump in power draw for the Radeon 7000-series — with a purported 130% boost in performance, the thermal design power (TDP) is naturally going to soar as well.
There have been a considerable amount of reports pointing toward how RTX 40-series cards will be among the most power-hungry boards in history. Certain models like the RTX 4090 are said to require 450 watts, while other cards could reach an unheard-of 900 watts.
In any case, regardless of what the actual power consumption level is for Radeon 7000 boards, it’s been heavily rumored that AMD’s cards will, at the very least, be a much more efficient offering compared to the RTX 40 series.
In fact, the company’s engineers are so confident in their upcoming GPUs that they reportedly believe that these cards will “demolish” Nvidia’s entire lineup in efficiency.
What do higher power consumption levels ultimately mean for consumers? Simply put, the lower the power draw, the less amount of electricity it will generate. You don’t want to be paying for a third of your power bill from just using your PC alone solely because of the GPUs in these systems.
AMD’s Radeon 7000 series is expected to become available starting in October 2022, while Nvidia’s RTX 40 lineup should see a similar launch period during the latter stages of this year.