In a generation or two we're going to start bumping up against regular US outlet limits. Gamers might start setting up their rigs in the kitchen to use the 20A outlets.

I've already started moving my desk into the laundry room so I can unhook the washer from the 240V outlet whenever I want to play Stardew Valley

Hilarious!

It is. I remember when I bought my GTX 260. It was crazy how much power hungry it was at the time for a mid market card. I had to buy a drumroll 450W PSU. Years later, I upgraded to a GTX 960. At first I thought "I probably need an even bigger PSU now...". I was shocked and then very happy to learn that the GTX 960 consumed less than my 7 generations older GPU. They can do it right when they care.

The GTX 260 was build on a 65 nm process, the 960 on a 28 nm process. This is one and a half full nodes apart, on similar planar processes with a full node really was a doubling of density. While the transistor count increased by more than that (1.4B to 5.2B), leading to a larger die size, it can't be overstated how much the improved process and decreased Vth helped power usage in this era. It would have been a challenge to use more power across those processes.

Believe me, chip designers care more about power now than they did then. Back in the larger process nodes when you moved to the next node the voltage scaled also, and as power is proportional to voltage squared, power went down. It was the ultimate free lunch, smaller, faster, lower power. That mostly ended around the 20nm node. Now designers work very hard to make things more power efficient, or stay within a thermal budget.

> What else is the next generation of cards supposed to do, have the same performance but make them more energy efficient? Not sure how many people would buy cards that have the same performance but less TDP.

This is what Intel did for a while with their "tick tock" strategy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tick%E2%80%93tock_model

They still do, basically, it's just tick tock tock, with the finally one specifically focused on efficiency.

i mean, the option is there depending on what your requirements are. i recently went from a 980ti to a 3070, doubling performance while decreasing TDP... as someone who has the card for casual use (only really make use of it a few times a month), i actually did just look for the fastest card that ran less hot than my current one (i've come to value quiet a bit more)

I actually did same just couple months ago, 980ti->3070. Though TDP claimed to be 220 but depend on vendor it seem it can peak to 250. Also one thing i liked after upgrade that 3070 have fan off when you aren't have load on it like desktop apps.

Power is a non issue for most people buying these cards for gaming. I couldn't care less if my desktop draws 500W or 1000W while gaming. If I get 144 fps vs 100 fps, I'll gladly accept the extra power consumption.

I assume you live in a country where electricity is still cheap. This is not universally true.

Not "just" energy prices (which is important!) but even things like your home. Pulling >1KW through a single power socket (or 1.5-2 KW once you account for CPU, monitor, etc.) is non-trivial for a lot of people.

At that level you're really in the territory where people will trip breakers in their home. This is "you have to hire an electrician and rewire part of your house" level of power consumption, which doesn't seem sustainable? Or at least "don't turn the stove on at the same time", which seems like an awfully disruptive way to ask people to live.

Heck, at that level for homes/cities with older electric service at lower amperages, the computer is now a significant fraction of the total service capacity of your connection to the city grid.

What's the response then? "Sorry you're not living in a new build home, forget about gaming"?

For me the wall-power isn't a huge issue but now you have to think about air conditioning. 1-2KW dissipating in a closed room heats the room up fast. This is already a problem with the RTX 2000-series that I'm running now and it seems like it'll be even worse.

"Glad you want to game, now please evaluate your home's electrical and HVAC systems to ensure they are compatible with a giant box pumping 2KW of power and converting it directly to heat"

>"Or at least "don't turn the stove on at the same time", which seems like an awfully disruptive way to ask people to live."

While reading this I felt a tinge of nostalgia for back when I had to ask my mother to stay off of the phone while I was online.

Even if power is expensive, it only uses that power when you are using it. The whole card is 450W, so maybe 3 hours of intense could be a dollar? The card isn’t going to be running 100% for any game I know. Compared to a slower 250W card, the premium is 1/2 that. With that it’s like you agree to pay an extra dollar for 6 hours of gaming. With expensive electricity. I feel like this is conservative and doesn’t seem to bad for people considering the most expensive consumer card on the market.

I’m in southern Sweden, which is seeing stupid electricity prices at the moment. My current daily electricity price tops out at 6.62 SEK per kW/h, so a 450W card would cost me a US dollar for a four hour gaming session.

Southern Norway crossed the 10NOK/kWh threshold earlier this year.

It is kind of mind boggling how this can happen for a country with almost infinite supply of hydro power, but here we are.

Of course, Norway being Norway, since the start of September we now get a 90% refund for everything above 0.7NOK (based on the average price of each 24 hours) so for most of us will survive.

Oh, and since most power plants are owned by the public this doesn't affect budgets as badly as it could have done.

(It is even more complicated but I don't have more time now. Someone please fill in if I got something really wrong. Also, yes, this is a wild tangent but thinking I know HN I guess it will the day a little less boring for someone : )

It’s reasonable to do both?

(although in this case I’m not blaming my government too much, beyond failing to anticipate Germany’s need for our excess energy, and for not setting a country-wide pricing model for electricity. With Putin’s current stupidity, a lot of the previous energy planning goes out of the window, and all we can do is hold on for the ride.)

The most expensive electricity is Germany at $0.40 / kwh vs the average of $0.15 / kwh. A 40 hour game will cost $10 extra.

> The most expensive electricity is Germany at $0.40 / kwh

That’s not true, my contract is for 0.41 (EUR, but that’s kinda the same right now) and I’ve seen far higher prices. Unless you are talking wholesale, which might be true but is useless for a consumer comparison.

>The most expensive electricity is Germany

In California with PGE we pay $0.49/Kwh on peak if you're using above "baseline"

https://www.pge.com/pge_global/common/pdfs/rate-plans/how-ra...

Our power bill for a <2000sqft single-family home is about $800 per month right now, and CA + PGE keep trying to do things like this to prevent solar from being worth it: https://www.solarpowerworldonline.com/2022/08/cpuc-proposed-...

Perhaps, but you're probably not buying a >$1000 graphics card if you can't afford your electricity bill.

Assuming you don't care about energy prices, climate change and fan noise, there is still thermal throttling that can lead to cycles of boost-throttle-boost-throttle that can result in uneven frame pacing.

Of course my assumption is that the system will be cooled adequately, avoiding any thermal throttling at sustained maximum load. That's true for the current hardware generation too.

I'm sure that for gaming, power is not an issue, but I will continue to lament that Intel and Nvidia do not give a shit about making power-efficient designs. They push the increased cost and headaches to consumers and OEMs who need to spend time and money cooling their computers.

Maybe that's the genius of their plan? The chip designers continue to put out better & hotter processors and expect someone else to figure out cooling. Thermal design failures are not attributed to Intel and Nvidia, instead to OEMs and consumers.

I don't understand. If you are unable to cool it properly, you can under-clock it, or run less intensive programs on it, or just get a last gen card.

Offering a more powerful GPU/CPU for people and use-cases that demand it is not a problem. Most games these days run well even on mid-tier cards of the 20 series, that's two generations ago. So people have all the choice in the world.

Just because a 1000 bhp LaFerrari exists in the market, doesn't mean you cannot buy a ~100 bhp Corolla. People who buy the Ferrari will need to take special care of their car to get the most out of it. That's a pleasure in itself for some.

Your car analogy is missing the fuel aspect. If I can get 1000HP with 50MPG, instead of 1000HP at 5MPG, I would buy a Ferrari.

At the high-end, Nvidia is making more powerful cards (HP) with the same fuel efficiency as before. Maybe they are making more efficient cards at the lower end but those don’t get attention on HN it seems.

> At the high-end, Nvidia is making more powerful cards (HP) with the same fuel efficiency as before.

No, perf/w is still climbing every generation. It'll climb hugely this generation too.

NVIDIA's marketing number is 2x perf at the same wattage as last gen, obviously needs to be validated by third party testing but they're shrinking two nodes at once here, it's a bigger node jump than Pascal was.

People have been primed to react negatively by a couple of twitter rumormongers like kopite7kimi. Yeah 4090 has a high TGP, but it's more like 400W TGP (450W TBP) and not the 800W TGP / 900W TBP that he was shouting from the rooftops about. There is still a huge gain in efficiency here, it's just also a very large (and expensive) chip on top of the higher efficiency.

But people don’t discard their incorrect mental frames when the information used to build them is falsified. Actually they just tend to retrench and dig deeper (“450W is still too much even if it is 2x perf/w!”). Ada is a power hog, “everybody knows it”.

https://videocardz.com/newz/flagship-nvidia-ada-sku-might-fe...

People said they wanted a balls-out big chip on a competitive node, that's exactly what the 4090 is, it's highly efficient and very large, this is much closer to the cutting edge of what the tech can deliver than Samsung 8nm junk or little baby 450mm2 dies. Now people are complaining about the TDP and the cost, even if it's more efficient that's not good enough. Unfortunately the TDP is a matter of physics, thermal density is going up every generation and a big chip on a modern node pulls a lot of power.

There are lower models in the stack too and those will maintain that efficiency benefit. It's a larger-than-pascal node shrink, efficiency is going up a lot here.

Their lower more efficient tiers of hardware haven't just disappeared because the halo product emphasizes performance over efficiency.

Most countries in Europe don't have AC in homes. Power consumption absolutely is an issue because of heat dissipation.

unless you're Apple and have your cake and eat it too...sometimes I wonder if maybe the design goals at NVIDIA and AMD are misplaced a bit

Most cards that come out seems to sell relatively well, so seems they are doing what consumers want: better performance in favor of everything else.

Would that inherently limits the customers/market though? The fps above all crowd would be happy but I would bet there's addressable people who would want 4080 performance in a small case that's relatively silent?

Except Apple doesn't really have their cake and eat it too. Their most powerful GPUs can be more than 10x slower than similarly priced Nvidia cards, particularly for ML and rendering workloads. At least in Nvidia's case, I think they've got their ducks in a row. Their 7nm GPUs get better performance-per-watt than Apple's 5nm ones. 'Nuff said.

ah but does Apple even want to ML on their GPU vs the dedicated neural engine thing they devoted more of their die space to?

Nowadays i found that watt per fps is better metric. And nvida is just milking performance by power draw more current (less efficient)

> And nvida is just milking performance by power draw more current (less efficient)

You'll be hard pressed to find a generation where power efficiency actually decreased. That didn't happen with the RTX 30xx series, for example. Even though power skyrocketed, performance increased by more than power did. Meaning efficiency still increased. That's been true for every generation I can think of, certainly all the more recent ones anyway. Maybe AMD had a few like that where they just re-rev'd the same architecture multiple times in a row.

Not NVidia, Intel. Intel has been unable to do a die shrink for years because they own their own fabs instead of using TSMC, GlobalFoundries, or Samsung to actually produce their chips. The new 4090s are supposed to be about 2x performance of a 3090 with the same power draw because of the smaller process (5nm TSMC vs 8nm Samsung).