Chrispy_I think you are right but this time around it will be much longer than two years, so it won't matter as much:

The Xbox and PS5 both have 16GB of RAM, usually allocating 10-12GB as VRAM and both consoles targeting 4K. Both consoles are "current" for the next 3-4 years and when their successors appear in 2027 (rumoured), game devs won't instantly swap to optimising for the newest consoles, they tend to away from the outgoing generation over a year or so, while the vast majority of their paying customers are still on the older hardware.

IMO 12GB is enough for at least 3 years, maybe even 5. Meanwhile, the 10GB of the 3080 and 8GB of the 3070 were widely questioned at launch - I forget whether it was a Sony or Microsoft presentation that claimed up to 13.5GB of the shared memory could be allocated to graphics, but the point is that we had entire consoles with 13.5GB of VRAM costing less than the GPUs in question that were hobbled out of the gate by miserly amounts of VRAM.

The 3070 in particular has been scaling poorly with resolution for a good year now, but it's only in the last couple of months that the 3070 has really struggled. Four big-budget AAA games run like ass on 8GB cards, with 3070 and 3070Ti owners given the no-win choice between stuttering or significantly lower graphics settings.

evernessinceRX 6800 can be had for around $500 on Amazon in the US so it's going to be cheaper. It also has more VRAM, which is important given games are already using more than the 4070 Ti's 12GB frame buffer.

Vya DomusFrequency and voltages automatically go down as the GPU approaches it's power limit, as such it becomes voltage limited because there is no more headroom at those frequency steps, this happens on pretty much every GPU. If you look at TPU's power figures practically all GPUs run at exactly their power limit.



Because that card is fast enough for games to become CPU limited in a lot more scenarios, a card like the 4070 will almost certainly be power limited 100% of the time.

napataBecause it's hitting top of the voltage-frequency curve before it hits the power limit. That's a voltage limit. That's also how most games work.

napataIn general if a PGU is constantly hitting the power limit it just means that the chosen power limit is actually too low for the programmed voltage-frequency curve.

Vya DomusYou realize this makes no sense, right ?

If the GPU is limited by voltage then it's always going to be that way, it makes no sense to design a card that hits a voltage limit before the power limit is reached.

You have this completely backwards, the reason the voltage-frequency curve exists in the first place is in order to regulate power and temperature. GPUs are specifically designed to hit their designated power targets, it's the power and temperature limit which dictate how high the frequencies go, not the other way around.

napataThey'll hit the top of the frequency curve before they hit the power limit.

napataI can show you Spider-Man with RT at 8K at sub 40 fps not hitting 450W if you want a personal example