8 ms·

450 watt TDP? I feel like a crazy person every time a new generation of GPU comes out and raises the bar on power consumption and heat generation. How is this

450 watt TDP? I feel like a crazy person every time a new generation of GPU comes out and raises the bar on power consumption and heat generation. How is this ok?

paulmd 4y ago
Dennard Scaling/MOSFET Scaling is over and it's starting to really bite. Power-per-transistor still goes down, but density is going up faster. Meaning an equal-sized chip on an old node vs a new node... the power goes up on the newer chip. Physics is telling you that you need to let the chip "shrink" when you shrink. If you keep piling on more transistors (by keeping the chip the same size) then the power goes up. That's how it works now. If you make the chip even bigger... it goes up a lot. And NVIDIA is increasing transistor count by 2.6x here. Efficiency (perf/w) is still going up significantly, but the chip also pulls more power on top of being more efficient. If that's not acceptable for your use-case, then you'll have to accept smaller chips and slower generational progress. The 4070 and 4060 will still exist if you absolutely don't want to go above 200W. Or you can buy the bigger chips and underclock them (setting a power limit is like two clicks) and run them in the efficiency sweet spot. But, everyone always complains about "NVIDIA won't make big chips, why are they selling small chips at a big-chip price" and now they've finally gone and done a big chip on a modern node, and people are still finding reasons to complain about it. This is what a high-density 600mm2 chip on TSMC N5P running at competitive clockrates looks like, it's a property of the node and not anything in particular that NVIDIA has done here. AMD's chips are on the same node and will be pretty spicy too - rumors are around 400W, for a slightly smaller chip. Again, TDP being more or less a property of the chip size and the node[0], that's what you'd expect. For a given library and frequency and assuming "average" transistor activity: transistor count determines die size, and die size determines TDP. You need to improve performance-per-transistor and that's no longer easy. [0] an oversimplification ofc but still That's the whole point of DLSS/XeSS/Streamline/potentially a DirectX API, get more performance-per-transistor by adding an accelerator unit which "punches above its weight" in some applicable task and pushes the perf/t curve upwards. But, people have whined nonstop about that since day 1 because using inference is a conspiracy from Big GPU to sell more tensor cores, or something, I guess. Surely there is some obvious solution to TAAU sample weighting that doesn't need inference, and it's just that every academic and programmer in the field has agreed not to talk about it for the last 20 years, right?
capableweb 4y ago
I'm not sure what else to expect? Is it so crazy that they make the card even faster and bigger than before, and it uses more power? 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.
- perryizgr8 4y ago
  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.
  - Retr0id 4y ago
    I assume you live in a country where electricity is still cheap. This is not universally true.
    - not_the_fda 4y ago
      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.
      - Semaphor 4y ago
        > 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.
        seanp2k2 4y ago
        >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-rates-work/Residential-Rates-Plan-Pricing.pdf 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-decision-on-nem-3-expected-by-sept-29/ https://www.solarpowerworldonline.com/2022/08/cpuc-proposed-...
izacus 4y ago
As a gamer... Should I care?
- TylerE 4y ago
  Depends, do you like your PC sounding like an airplane from all the fans spinning up?
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - izacus 4y ago
    Nope, the triple fan setup in a big case is fine - if anything, the 3xxx gen cards are quieter than previous ones.
  - ghosty141 4y ago
    Running games that put my GPU (rtx 3080) usage at 90-100% doesn't even make my PC audible when having (open back) headphones on with ingame sound a normal levels. If you invest in good components and focus on quietness you can get great performance without much noise. In my case, without any watercooling. With watercooling and a big rad, it can get even quieter.
- aordano 4y ago
  If you're on 110V you should care about the current limits
- jaimehrubiks 4y ago
  Some people might need to upgrade the PSU
- leetcrew 4y ago
  imo people get a bit too worked up over the peak power draw of parts that are going to be fully loaded only a couple hours per day. the bigger issue is where all that additional heat is going and how. I'll be paying close attention to the SPL metrics for this generation.
nfRfqX5n 4y ago
Market doesn’t seem to care yet
thamer 4y ago
This is not a new development with the 40 series. The RTX 3090 Ti already had a 450W TDP: https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/geforce-rtx-3090-ti.c3829 https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/geforce-rtx-3090-ti.c3... What you describe is accurate, the 3090 Ti produces a tremendous amount of heat under load in my experience and I would expect the same with these new cards.
ftufek 4y ago
For what it's worth, you can power limit them and I'd highly recommend it if you plan on running a few of these. In the past we've power limited RTX 3090s to 250W (100W lower than original) while losing negligible amount of performance.
- Melatonic 4y ago
  Do you just limit using something like MSI Afterburner? I was undervolting and underclocking my Titan XP for a long time (with a separate curve for gaming) but lost the config and have been lazy to go back. I mainly did this because it has a mediocre cooler (blower design that is not nearly as good as the current ones but also not terrible) and even at low usage it was producing a lot of heat and making some noise (the rest of my system I specifically designed to have super low noise).
  - ftufek 4y ago
    I just used `nvidia-smi -pl 250` on linux, it's built into the driver itself, I'm sure there's equivalent tools (or maybe even nvidia-smi itself) for Windows as well.
    - smoldesu 4y ago
      I'll also add that Nvidia's drivers are fairly good at keeping wattages relatively low, at least for desktop cards. My 3070 will idle ~10 watts when decoding video or just accelerating my desktop environment. You only see that 300-watt TDP take effect when doing consecutive renders or local ML like Stable Diffusion, and you'll definitely want the extra power.
      - Melatonic 4y ago
        The fan curves though kinda suck for the default nvidia drivers - especially on the blower it will run them super low to try to make it silent (which is not very efficient heat wise) and then not start spinning it up until it is really under load. Whereas there is a level that is barely an increase in perceptible noise that cools the GPU significantly more and for many mid range loads will not end up with with the GPU temp (and the fan) going through lots of highs and lows.
amelius 4y ago
Hardware designers produce more Watts where software developers create more bloat.
behnamoh 4y ago
Apple M1 showed us that it’s possible to increase performance while keeping the power consumption low—laptop level low.
- cma 4y ago
  They bought out exclusive access to the most efficient node, making it impossible for others rather than showing it is possible for them (though it presumably would have been possible if they outbid Apple at the time).
anonporridge 4y ago
It's quite funny seeing this and the 2000 watt society on the HN frontpage at the same time. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32899656 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32899656
- cjbgkagh 4y ago
  When I first saw that headline I thought it was a society for people who have 2000 watt PSUs.
jltsiren 4y ago
It's good to remember that you don't have to buy the most powerful GPU model just because you can afford it. Some people are probably in the target audience for the 4090. Others may prefer the 4080 models, which have a slightly lower TDP than the 3080 models but still get a nice performance boost from much higher clock rates.
aseipp 4y ago
The 3090 Ti series was already pushing 450W so this isn't new.[1] And it's because they clock these things incredibly high, well beyond the efficiency curve where it makes sense. Because that's what gaming customers expect, basically. On the datacenter cards they quadruple or octuple the memory bus width, and they drop the clocks substantially and hit iso-perf with way, way better power. But those high-bandwidth memory interfaces are expensive and gaming workloads often can't saturate them, leaving the compute cores starved. So they instead ramp the hell out of the clocks and power delivery to make up for that and pump data into the cores as fast as possible on a narrow bus. That takes a lot of power and power usage isn't linear. It's just the nature of the market these things target. High compute needs, but low-ish memory/bus needs. This isn't necessarily a bad or losing strategy, BTW, it just is what it is. Data paths are often very hot and don't scale linearly in many dimensions, just like power usage doesn't. Using smaller bus widths and improving bus clock in return is a very legitimate strategy to improve overall performance, it's just one of those tough tradeoffs. Rule of thumb: take any flagship GPU and undervolt it by 30%, saving 30% power/heat dissipation, and you'll retain +90% of the performance in practice. My 3080 is nominally 320/350W but in practice I just cliff it to about 280W and it's perfectly OK in everything. [1] Some people might even be positively surprised, since a lot of the "leaks" (bullshit rumors) were posting astronomically ridiculous numbers like 800W+ for the 4090 Ti, etc.
- seanp2k2 4y ago
  Yeah, I thought those leaks were pretty insane, like are we really going to all need 1KW+ PSUs to run flagship GPUs? I picked up an 850W Seasonic Prime a few upgrades ago and even running benchmarks on an OC 12900KS + 3090 with 8 case fans it's totally fine. I was hoping to not have to upgrade PSUs for another few years.
- PragmaticPulp 4y ago
  > The 3090 Ti series was already pushing 450W so this isn't new.[1] Every time this comes up, people forget that: 1) Flagship cards like the 3090 Ti and 4090 consume significantly more power than typical cards. You should not buy a flagship card if power is a concern. 2) You don't have to buy the flagship card. Product lineups extend all the way down to tiny single-fan cards that fit inside of small cases and silent HTPCs. It's a range of products and they all have different power consumption. 3) You don't have to run any card at full power. It's trivial to turn the power limit down to a much lower number if you want. You can drop 1/3 of the power and lose only ~10-15% of the performance in many cases due to non-linear scaling. 4) The industry has already been shipping 450W TDP cards and it's fine. If power is an issue, buy a lower power card. The high TDP cards are an option but that doesn't mean that every card consumes 450W
jackmott42 4y ago
People want to render more triangles. What are you gonna do?
fomine3 4y ago
I wonder when Nvidia start selling lower powered model like Intel "T" CPU. It's just underclocked/undervolted and a bit binned chip, but some consumer like it. EnergyStar also will like it.

450 watt TDP? I feel like a crazy person every time a new generation of GPU comes out and raises the bar on power consumption and heat generation. How is this ok?

paulmd 4y ago

Dennard Scaling/MOSFET Scaling is over and it's starting to really bite. Power-per-transistor still goes down, but density is going up faster. Meaning an equal-sized chip on an old node vs a new node... the power goes up on the newer chip. Physics is telling you that you need to let the chip "shrink" when you shrink. If you keep piling on more transistors (by keeping the chip the same size) then the power goes up. That's how it works now. If you make the chip even bigger... it goes up a lot. And NVIDIA is increasing transistor count by 2.6x here. Efficiency (perf/w) is still going up significantly, but the chip also pulls more power on top of being more efficient. If that's not acceptable for your use-case, then you'll have to accept smaller chips and slower generational progress. The 4070 and 4060 will still exist if you absolutely don't want to go above 200W. Or you can buy the bigger chips and underclock them (setting a power limit is like two clicks) and run them in the efficiency sweet spot. But, everyone always complains about "NVIDIA won't make big chips, why are they selling small chips at a big-chip price" and now they've finally gone and done a big chip on a modern node, and people are still finding reasons to complain about it. This is what a high-density 600mm2 chip on TSMC N5P running at competitive clockrates looks like, it's a property of the node and not anything in particular that NVIDIA has done here. AMD's chips are on the same node and will be pretty spicy too - rumors are around 400W, for a slightly smaller chip. Again, TDP being more or less a property of the chip size and the node[0], that's what you'd expect. For a given library and frequency and assuming "average" transistor activity: transistor count determines die size, and die size determines TDP. You need to improve performance-per-transistor and that's no longer easy. [0] an oversimplification ofc but still That's the whole point of DLSS/XeSS/Streamline/potentially a DirectX API, get more performance-per-transistor by adding an accelerator unit which "punches above its weight" in some applicable task and pushes the perf/t curve upwards. But, people have whined nonstop about that since day 1 because using inference is a conspiracy from Big GPU to sell more tensor cores, or something, I guess. Surely there is some obvious solution to TAAU sample weighting that doesn't need inference, and it's just that every academic and programmer in the field has agreed not to talk about it for the last 20 years, right?

capableweb 4y ago

I'm not sure what else to expect? Is it so crazy that they make the card even faster and bigger than before, and it uses more power? 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.

perryizgr8 4y ago
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.
- Retr0id 4y ago
  I assume you live in a country where electricity is still cheap. This is not universally true.
  - not_the_fda 4y ago
    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.
    - Semaphor 4y ago
      > 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.
      - seanp2k2 4y ago
        >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-rates-work/Residential-Rates-Plan-Pricing.pdf 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-decision-on-nem-3-expected-by-sept-29/ https://www.solarpowerworldonline.com/2022/08/cpuc-proposed-...

izacus 4y ago

As a gamer... Should I care?

TylerE 4y ago
Depends, do you like your PC sounding like an airplane from all the fans spinning up?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- izacus 4y ago
  Nope, the triple fan setup in a big case is fine - if anything, the 3xxx gen cards are quieter than previous ones.
- ghosty141 4y ago
  Running games that put my GPU (rtx 3080) usage at 90-100% doesn't even make my PC audible when having (open back) headphones on with ingame sound a normal levels. If you invest in good components and focus on quietness you can get great performance without much noise. In my case, without any watercooling. With watercooling and a big rad, it can get even quieter.
aordano 4y ago
If you're on 110V you should care about the current limits
jaimehrubiks 4y ago
Some people might need to upgrade the PSU
leetcrew 4y ago
imo people get a bit too worked up over the peak power draw of parts that are going to be fully loaded only a couple hours per day. the bigger issue is where all that additional heat is going and how. I'll be paying close attention to the SPL metrics for this generation.

nfRfqX5n 4y ago

Market doesn’t seem to care yet

thamer 4y ago

This is not a new development with the 40 series. The RTX 3090 Ti already had a 450W TDP: https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/geforce-rtx-3090-ti.c3829 https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/geforce-rtx-3090-ti.c3... What you describe is accurate, the 3090 Ti produces a tremendous amount of heat under load in my experience and I would expect the same with these new cards.

ftufek 4y ago

For what it's worth, you can power limit them and I'd highly recommend it if you plan on running a few of these. In the past we've power limited RTX 3090s to 250W (100W lower than original) while losing negligible amount of performance.

Melatonic 4y ago
Do you just limit using something like MSI Afterburner? I was undervolting and underclocking my Titan XP for a long time (with a separate curve for gaming) but lost the config and have been lazy to go back. I mainly did this because it has a mediocre cooler (blower design that is not nearly as good as the current ones but also not terrible) and even at low usage it was producing a lot of heat and making some noise (the rest of my system I specifically designed to have super low noise).
- ftufek 4y ago
  I just used `nvidia-smi -pl 250` on linux, it's built into the driver itself, I'm sure there's equivalent tools (or maybe even nvidia-smi itself) for Windows as well.
  - smoldesu 4y ago
    I'll also add that Nvidia's drivers are fairly good at keeping wattages relatively low, at least for desktop cards. My 3070 will idle ~10 watts when decoding video or just accelerating my desktop environment. You only see that 300-watt TDP take effect when doing consecutive renders or local ML like Stable Diffusion, and you'll definitely want the extra power.
    - Melatonic 4y ago
      The fan curves though kinda suck for the default nvidia drivers - especially on the blower it will run them super low to try to make it silent (which is not very efficient heat wise) and then not start spinning it up until it is really under load. Whereas there is a level that is barely an increase in perceptible noise that cools the GPU significantly more and for many mid range loads will not end up with with the GPU temp (and the fan) going through lots of highs and lows.

amelius 4y ago

Hardware designers produce more Watts where software developers create more bloat.

behnamoh 4y ago

Apple M1 showed us that it’s possible to increase performance while keeping the power consumption low—laptop level low.

cma 4y ago
They bought out exclusive access to the most efficient node, making it impossible for others rather than showing it is possible for them (though it presumably would have been possible if they outbid Apple at the time).

anonporridge 4y ago

It's quite funny seeing this and the 2000 watt society on the HN frontpage at the same time. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32899656 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32899656

cjbgkagh 4y ago
When I first saw that headline I thought it was a society for people who have 2000 watt PSUs.

jltsiren 4y ago

It's good to remember that you don't have to buy the most powerful GPU model just because you can afford it. Some people are probably in the target audience for the 4090. Others may prefer the 4080 models, which have a slightly lower TDP than the 3080 models but still get a nice performance boost from much higher clock rates.

aseipp 4y ago

The 3090 Ti series was already pushing 450W so this isn't new.[1] And it's because they clock these things incredibly high, well beyond the efficiency curve where it makes sense. Because that's what gaming customers expect, basically. On the datacenter cards they quadruple or octuple the memory bus width, and they drop the clocks substantially and hit iso-perf with way, way better power. But those high-bandwidth memory interfaces are expensive and gaming workloads often can't saturate them, leaving the compute cores starved. So they instead ramp the hell out of the clocks and power delivery to make up for that and pump data into the cores as fast as possible on a narrow bus. That takes a lot of power and power usage isn't linear. It's just the nature of the market these things target. High compute needs, but low-ish memory/bus needs. This isn't necessarily a bad or losing strategy, BTW, it just is what it is. Data paths are often very hot and don't scale linearly in many dimensions, just like power usage doesn't. Using smaller bus widths and improving bus clock in return is a very legitimate strategy to improve overall performance, it's just one of those tough tradeoffs. Rule of thumb: take any flagship GPU and undervolt it by 30%, saving 30% power/heat dissipation, and you'll retain +90% of the performance in practice. My 3080 is nominally 320/350W but in practice I just cliff it to about 280W and it's perfectly OK in everything. [1] Some people might even be positively surprised, since a lot of the "leaks" (bullshit rumors) were posting astronomically ridiculous numbers like 800W+ for the 4090 Ti, etc.

seanp2k2 4y ago
Yeah, I thought those leaks were pretty insane, like are we really going to all need 1KW+ PSUs to run flagship GPUs? I picked up an 850W Seasonic Prime a few upgrades ago and even running benchmarks on an OC 12900KS + 3090 with 8 case fans it's totally fine. I was hoping to not have to upgrade PSUs for another few years.
PragmaticPulp 4y ago
> The 3090 Ti series was already pushing 450W so this isn't new.[1] Every time this comes up, people forget that: 1) Flagship cards like the 3090 Ti and 4090 consume significantly more power than typical cards. You should not buy a flagship card if power is a concern. 2) You don't have to buy the flagship card. Product lineups extend all the way down to tiny single-fan cards that fit inside of small cases and silent HTPCs. It's a range of products and they all have different power consumption. 3) You don't have to run any card at full power. It's trivial to turn the power limit down to a much lower number if you want. You can drop 1/3 of the power and lose only ~10-15% of the performance in many cases due to non-linear scaling. 4) The industry has already been shipping 450W TDP cards and it's fine. If power is an issue, buy a lower power card. The high TDP cards are an option but that doesn't mean that every card consumes 450W

jackmott42 4y ago

People want to render more triangles. What are you gonna do?

fomine3 4y ago

I wonder when Nvidia start selling lower powered model like Intel "T" CPU. It's just underclocked/undervolted and a bit binned chip, but some consumer like it. EnergyStar also will like it.