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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

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-...
- robin_reala 4y ago
  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.
  - bslqn 4y ago
    - robin_reala 4y ago
      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.)
  - eitland 4y ago
    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 : )
- swid 4y ago
  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.
- potatolicious 4y ago
  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"
  - BitwiseFool 4y ago
    >"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.
- __david__ 4y ago
  Perhaps, but you're probably not buying a >$1000 graphics card if you can't afford your electricity bill.
nicolaslem 4y ago
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.
- perryizgr8 4y ago
  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.
guhidalg 4y ago
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.
- perryizgr8 4y ago
  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.
  - guhidalg 4y ago
    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.
    - paulmd 4y ago
      > 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-feature-18176-cores-48gb-memory-and-800w-tdp 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.
TuxSH 4y ago
Most countries in Europe don't have AC in homes. Power consumption absolutely is an issue because of heat dissipation.

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-...
robin_reala 4y ago
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.
- bslqn 4y ago
  - robin_reala 4y ago
    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.)
- eitland 4y ago
  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 : )
swid 4y ago
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.
potatolicious 4y ago
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"
- BitwiseFool 4y ago
  >"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.
__david__ 4y ago
Perhaps, but you're probably not buying a >$1000 graphics card if you can't afford your electricity bill.

nicolaslem 4y ago

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.

perryizgr8 4y ago
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.

guhidalg 4y ago

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.

perryizgr8 4y ago
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.
- guhidalg 4y ago
  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.
  - paulmd 4y ago
    > 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-feature-18176-cores-48gb-memory-and-800w-tdp 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.

TuxSH 4y ago

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