AMD expects Nvidia's next-gen GPUs to be very power hungry
Published: 27th June 2022 | Source: AMD Interview - Tom's Hardware | Author: Mark Campbell
AMD believes that Nvidia will push next-gen GPU power consumption "a lot higher than we will"
In a recent interview with Tom's Hardware, AMD's Sam Naffziger, a Senior Vice President, Corporate Fellow, and Product Technology Architect, has suggested that their next-generation RDNA 3 graphics cards will be more efficient than Nvidia's RTX 40 series products.
With RDNA 3, power efficiency is a major focus for AMD, with AMD expecting greater than 50% performance per watt improvements from the architecture. This efficiency comes from AMD's use of 5nm lithography, AMD's re-architected compute-units, optimised graphics pipeline, and next-generation infinity cache.
Like Nvidia's RTX 40 series, AMD appears to be planning to increase the power limits of their high-end RDNA 3 products. Naffziger said, "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."
With greater power efficiency comes more performance per watt of power consumed. That alone increases AMD's GPU performance. Adding more power into the mix can increase GPU performance even further, giving AMD's RDNA 3 series GPUs the potential to deliver a significant performance leap over their current-generation RDNA 2 counterparts.
"they'll have to push them a lot higher than we will"
I don't know about you, but I believe that this is the most important quote from Sam Naffziger's entire interview. This quote shows that AMD believes that AMD can deliver better performance per watt than Nvidia's RTX 40 series, and that AMD thinks that they can match or beat Nvidia's next-generation flagship while consuming less power.
If this is true, AMD's RDNA 3 series GPUs will be revolutionary for Radeon. Lower power consumption levels allows AMD's GPUs to use smaller heatsinks (and potentially run quieter), and use less expensive power management systems/components than their Nvidia counterparts. This helps to increase AMD's margins and allows AMD to deliver more competitive pricing. If you can increase performance per watt, you deliver higher performance levels while also lowing the material costs of many aspects of a graphics card. Increasing performance per watt is a win-win for AMD.
Assuming that AMD is correct in their assumptions, Nvidia GPUs will need more complex power management systems, larger heatsinks, and potentially require users to upgrade their power supplies. If Nvidia need more power to match or exceed AMD's performance with RDNA 3, it will place Nvidia at a huge disadvantage.
If AMD is correct about their assumptions with RDNA 3, and they have the performance needed to go toe-to-toe with Nvidia within the high-end PC market, RDNA 3 could be a turning point for team Radeon. While both RDNA and RDNA 2 closed the gap between AMD and Nvidia, Nvidia remains the GPU market's top dog, and AMD remains behind Nvidia on several technological fronts, with ray tracing performance and DLSS being huge advantages for Nvidia.
While AMD's FSR 2.0 technology is a strong counter to DLSS, to remains to be seen if RDNA 3 has what it takes to bring AMD to the top of the PC market when it comes to ray tracing performance. If AMD has significantly increased their ray tracing performance with RDNA 3, AMD's RX 7000 series GPUs should win AMD a lot of market share.
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