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Unfortunately so far these are underwhelming. Hope AMD figures out a fix for the very high idle (>100 W) consumption when more than one monitor is connected (id

Unfortunately so far these are underwhelming. Hope AMD figures out a fix for the very high idle (>100 W) consumption when more than one monitor is connected (idle with a single monitor is also bad, but not quite as egregious). In terms of performance they're good, but the much lower efficiency (20-50 % lower) compared to NV Ada suggests to me that AMD aimed for a lower performance level and had to bump performance up on short notice. The high power draw through the slot, which GPUs generally avoid nowadays for a number of reasons, also seems to suggest this - AMD is clearly trying to get every single Watt into the card they can. Non-reference cards more or less all have three eight pin power connectors - I'd go so far as to say the two connectors on the reference cards are basically marketing to seem more efficient. Though even with European electricity prices, the generally higher (real world) power consumption of these doesn't make the (more expensive) 4080 a better deal. Maybe if prices cross over the 1 buck/kWh threshold. Never say never! The smart move is to wait a couple months and see if AMD can fix the bigger issues with these cards through drivers and only buy one of these if they do.

snvzz 4y ago
>The smart move is to wait a couple months and see if AMD can fix the bigger issues with these cards through drivers and only buy one of these if they do. That's pretty much it. The assumptions/rumors/leaks and such right now[0] point to underwhelming release drivers. Like they aren't taking advantage of the hardware, or have clutches in place until they can get higher utilization of the hardware to be stable. By CES, there'll surely be announcements of other RDNA3 cards. By the time these get reviewed, drivers should be closer to where they should be, and informed decisions much easier to make. Right now, the 20% higher priced 4080 gets you 17% better RT, while raster suffers -8%. Therefore 7900XTX is better value, just not by as much as everybody hoped. This might or might not change with newer drivers. I do not recommend buying any AMD RDNA3 nor 4000-series NVIDIA right now. Waiting to see what happens once lower-end cards enter the market is my advice. 0. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=351H7F0QoKE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=351H7F0QoKE
- formerly_proven 4y ago
  Yeah. For the 7900 XT/XTX though it's already quite clear if you want it, you really want an AIB board and not the reference card, which seem to be marginal overall (power delivery, cooling).
  - snvzz 4y ago
    Yes, AIB reviews are already out and they perform much better than the reference card, and have surprisingly good overclocking to add on top. ... matching the 4090 in Cyberpunk, while drawing less power.
- philliphaydon 4y ago
  I wouldn’t wait. AMD started the 6000 series struggling to keep pace with the 3000 series and now they are on par or better. (Exception of RT) They did similar with 5000. So no doubt things will improve with 7000 series.
lhl 4y ago
I don't think Phoronix had idle consumption numbers for Linux unless I missed it? I'd be curious if it's a problem in Linux as well as windows, as I do believe that it's either a firmware or driver bug. One thing pointing to that is that ComputerBase had much lower idle power numbers with a multi-monitor setup (power consumption in various reviews seem to show differences depending on different monitor models connected) but it still went significantly higher with video playback: https://www.computerbase.de/2022-12/amd-radeon-rx-7900-xtx-xt-review-test/5/#abschnitt_leistungsaufnahme_spiele_youtube_desktop https://www.computerbase.de/2022-12/amd-radeon-rx-7900-xtx-x... For power efficiency, considering that Ada is a monolithic TSMC N5 variant (4N) die while Navi31 is a combination of N5 + N6 for the 6 MCDs, maybe it's not so surprising... One thing to note is that historically, GPUs companies are almost always pushing towards the far end of the VF curve for their top-tier cards. For example, while the 4090 has gotten tons of flack for it's power consumption, cable melting, etc, a Korean review site did testing on power limiting and undervolting while gaming [1] and found that you could basically switch to an 80% Power Limit (only 21W of power savings though) and lose <1% performance. Alternatively, with a slight undervolt, you could shave 58W of power consumption while lowering performance by 1.2%, or 95W (from the 347W stock) with 4.6% lower performance. As to the smart move, IMO from a price-perf perspective, all of these new cards are a bit out-to-lunch. For gaming, high-end last generation cards (like a 6800XT at $600) will get you to 4K60 on almost all AAA titles and are a fraction of the price of the Radeon 7000 or RTX 4000 series. Also, while I'm a big fan of open source drivers, those doing ML are basically forced to buy Nvidia atm. [1] https://quasarzone-com.translate.goog/bbs/qc_plan/views/30686?_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en-GB https://quasarzone-com.translate.goog/bbs/qc_plan/views/3068...
- CoastalCoder 4y ago
  They may be referring to this post in the comment section: [0] [0] https://www.phoronix.com/forums/forum/phoronix/latest-phoronix-articles/1361598-amd-radeon-rx-7900-xtx-rx-7900-xt-linux-support-performance?p=1361601#post1361601 https://www.phoronix.com/forums/forum/phoronix/latest-phoron...
robin_reala 4y ago
My electricity (southern Sweden) is going to peak at 917 öre / kWh today, which is 0.89 USD. So we’re not far off.
- bacro 4y ago
  How is that possible? In Portugal, for me it will be 0,26€ / kWh in January.
  - robin_reala 4y ago
    Long and complicated reasons, but basically multiple pricing areas within Sweden, no good HVDC connections from the north, where most of our power generation is, and a very power-hungry Germany just over the Baltic.
nottorp 4y ago
> Hope AMD figures out a fix for the very high idle (>100 W) consumption when more than one monitor is connected (idle with a single monitor is also bad, but not quite as egregious). 100 W just the card or the whole system? In Linux? Because I've seen ~20W windows numbers for just the card for AMD. Mind, less powerful cards. NVidia does do better for multimonitor desktops tho.
- bacro 4y ago
  Just for the card
  - nottorp 4y ago
    holy ...
0cf8612b2e1e 4y ago
On Linux, my Nvidia 3070 idles at about 100w. While ridiculous, I assumed that was just the state of things. Should I be seeing something much lower?
- formerly_proven 4y ago
  A 1080 Ti driving multiple displays idles at ~13 W and consumes about 18-20 W for video playback. So, yeah.
  - 0cf8612b2e1e 4y ago
    Bah. Nvidia drivers.
- thulle 4y ago
  That seem a bit high. Are you running a graphics heavy desktop environment? I'm currently browsing on one monitor and having a twitch stream with GPU accelerated decoding on another, and nvidia-smi reports 49 W for my 3080. Nvidia 525 drivers & Fluxbox as window manager. Using an AMD 5950X CPU, currently with powersave governor, my PSU reports a total power usage of 120 W.
  - 0cf8612b2e1e 4y ago
    Either I was grossly misremembering or a driver update has fixed an issue. Now reporting 23 watts on a fairly idle system.

snvzz 4y ago

>The smart move is to wait a couple months and see if AMD can fix the bigger issues with these cards through drivers and only buy one of these if they do. That's pretty much it. The assumptions/rumors/leaks and such right now[0] point to underwhelming release drivers. Like they aren't taking advantage of the hardware, or have clutches in place until they can get higher utilization of the hardware to be stable. By CES, there'll surely be announcements of other RDNA3 cards. By the time these get reviewed, drivers should be closer to where they should be, and informed decisions much easier to make. Right now, the 20% higher priced 4080 gets you 17% better RT, while raster suffers -8%. Therefore 7900XTX is better value, just not by as much as everybody hoped. This might or might not change with newer drivers. I do not recommend buying any AMD RDNA3 nor 4000-series NVIDIA right now. Waiting to see what happens once lower-end cards enter the market is my advice. 0. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=351H7F0QoKE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=351H7F0QoKE

formerly_proven 4y ago
Yeah. For the 7900 XT/XTX though it's already quite clear if you want it, you really want an AIB board and not the reference card, which seem to be marginal overall (power delivery, cooling).
- snvzz 4y ago
  Yes, AIB reviews are already out and they perform much better than the reference card, and have surprisingly good overclocking to add on top. ... matching the 4090 in Cyberpunk, while drawing less power.
philliphaydon 4y ago
I wouldn’t wait. AMD started the 6000 series struggling to keep pace with the 3000 series and now they are on par or better. (Exception of RT) They did similar with 5000. So no doubt things will improve with 7000 series.

lhl 4y ago

I don't think Phoronix had idle consumption numbers for Linux unless I missed it? I'd be curious if it's a problem in Linux as well as windows, as I do believe that it's either a firmware or driver bug. One thing pointing to that is that ComputerBase had much lower idle power numbers with a multi-monitor setup (power consumption in various reviews seem to show differences depending on different monitor models connected) but it still went significantly higher with video playback: https://www.computerbase.de/2022-12/amd-radeon-rx-7900-xtx-xt-review-test/5/#abschnitt_leistungsaufnahme_spiele_youtube_desktop https://www.computerbase.de/2022-12/amd-radeon-rx-7900-xtx-x... For power efficiency, considering that Ada is a monolithic TSMC N5 variant (4N) die while Navi31 is a combination of N5 + N6 for the 6 MCDs, maybe it's not so surprising... One thing to note is that historically, GPUs companies are almost always pushing towards the far end of the VF curve for their top-tier cards. For example, while the 4090 has gotten tons of flack for it's power consumption, cable melting, etc, a Korean review site did testing on power limiting and undervolting while gaming [1] and found that you could basically switch to an 80% Power Limit (only 21W of power savings though) and lose <1% performance. Alternatively, with a slight undervolt, you could shave 58W of power consumption while lowering performance by 1.2%, or 95W (from the 347W stock) with 4.6% lower performance. As to the smart move, IMO from a price-perf perspective, all of these new cards are a bit out-to-lunch. For gaming, high-end last generation cards (like a 6800XT at $600) will get you to 4K60 on almost all AAA titles and are a fraction of the price of the Radeon 7000 or RTX 4000 series. Also, while I'm a big fan of open source drivers, those doing ML are basically forced to buy Nvidia atm. [1] https://quasarzone-com.translate.goog/bbs/qc_plan/views/30686?_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en-GB https://quasarzone-com.translate.goog/bbs/qc_plan/views/3068...

CoastalCoder 4y ago
They may be referring to this post in the comment section: [0] [0] https://www.phoronix.com/forums/forum/phoronix/latest-phoronix-articles/1361598-amd-radeon-rx-7900-xtx-rx-7900-xt-linux-support-performance?p=1361601#post1361601 https://www.phoronix.com/forums/forum/phoronix/latest-phoron...

robin_reala 4y ago

My electricity (southern Sweden) is going to peak at 917 öre / kWh today, which is 0.89 USD. So we’re not far off.

bacro 4y ago
How is that possible? In Portugal, for me it will be 0,26€ / kWh in January.
- robin_reala 4y ago
  Long and complicated reasons, but basically multiple pricing areas within Sweden, no good HVDC connections from the north, where most of our power generation is, and a very power-hungry Germany just over the Baltic.

nottorp 4y ago

> Hope AMD figures out a fix for the very high idle (>100 W) consumption when more than one monitor is connected (idle with a single monitor is also bad, but not quite as egregious). 100 W just the card or the whole system? In Linux? Because I've seen ~20W windows numbers for just the card for AMD. Mind, less powerful cards. NVidia does do better for multimonitor desktops tho.

bacro 4y ago
Just for the card
- nottorp 4y ago
  holy ...

0cf8612b2e1e 4y ago

On Linux, my Nvidia 3070 idles at about 100w. While ridiculous, I assumed that was just the state of things. Should I be seeing something much lower?

formerly_proven 4y ago
A 1080 Ti driving multiple displays idles at ~13 W and consumes about 18-20 W for video playback. So, yeah.
- 0cf8612b2e1e 4y ago
  Bah. Nvidia drivers.
thulle 4y ago
That seem a bit high. Are you running a graphics heavy desktop environment? I'm currently browsing on one monitor and having a twitch stream with GPU accelerated decoding on another, and nvidia-smi reports 49 W for my 3080. Nvidia 525 drivers & Fluxbox as window manager. Using an AMD 5950X CPU, currently with powersave governor, my PSU reports a total power usage of 120 W.
- 0cf8612b2e1e 4y ago
  Either I was grossly misremembering or a driver update has fixed an issue. Now reporting 23 watts on a fairly idle system.