<75w GPUs are dying?

[GoldenX]

Have you noticed how rare are GPUs with good performance but without PCI-e power connectors?
I mean, the only ones are the 750ti and a R7-250 or HD7750, all of them are pretty old.
In the past an HD5670, a 7600GT, a 6600 could fare a lot better with games of that time than today's options.

What I mean is, I don't see the point in improving Perf/Watt if AMD and Nvidia only release >150w monsters. I want my Fiji/Maxwell <75w card!

 

[LightningJR]

750ti? It came out first as a Maxwell card. Back when it came out it fared as good as a 7600gt in it's time.

 

[uuuaaaaaa]

16nm fin fet may bring some surprises, lets wait and see!

 

[GoldenX]

Yeah but it's nearly 2 years old now, the 950 should have been an improvement, not a 90w card.
You don't even see them in reviews, a lot of them start with a 370/960.

 

[uuuaaaaaa]

Yeah but it's nearly 2 years old now, the 950 should have been an improvement, not a 90w card.
You don't even see them in reviews, a lot of them start with a 370/960.

The games are getting more and more demanding... The processing power to run those games, even at low mid settings is such that even with new processing nodes, 75w is not enough anymore to drive all those pixels... At least at first glance that is my take on it... IIRC the x1950xtx was a 96w tdp...

 

[LightningJR]

16nm fin fet may bring some surprises, lets wait and see!

^this

The fact that we're still on 28nm, which came out 3+ yrs ago, really doesn't help. The fact that NVidia still managed to create a power efficient architecture (Maxwell) on the same process technology is unusual, the expected result would be more inline with how AMD's cards are.

We really need the shrink asap.

 

[GoldenX]

The games are getting more and more demanding... The processing power to run those games, even at low mid settings is such that even with new processing nodes, 75w is not enough anymore to drive all those pixels... At least at first glance that is my take on it...

Good point, I hope it doesn't mean a stale in perf. improvement like we have now on CPUs.
I mean, all the promises are HBM2 and a shrink, that sounds like the Intel way.

 

[uuuaaaaaa]

^this

The fact that we're still on 28nm, which came out 3+ yrs ago, really doesn't help. The fact that NVidia still managed to create a power efficient architecture (Maxwell) on the same process technology is unusual, the expected result would be more inline with how AMD's cards are.

We really need the shrink asap.

To my knowledge nvidia achieved that efficiency at the cost of severely "gimping" the compute power on Maxwell, nevertheless an impressive feat.

 

[uuuaaaaaa]

Good point, I hope it doesn't mean a stale in perf. improvement like we have now on CPUs.
I mean, all the promises are HBM2 and a shrink, that sounds like the Intel way.

I think that is down to fact that Intel has a huge advantage over AMD. If Zen turns out to be as good as AMD is praising it to be (no reason to doubt it, Jim Keller is the cpu wizard!) I have no doubt that Intel will move their asses...

 

[GoldenX]

I think that is down to fact that Intel has a huge advantage over AMD. If Zen turns out to be as good as AMD is praising it to be (no reason to doubt it, Jim Keller is the cpu wizard!) I have no doubt that Intel will move their asses...

I hope Zen delivers it's promises, I would love to have an APU only ITX pc that could game modestly well on 1920x1080.

 

[LightningJR]

Good point, I hope it doesn't mean a stale in perf. improvement like we have now on CPUs.
I mean, all the promises are HBM2 and a shrink, that sounds like the Intel way.

Well HBM2 is more power efficient and has immense bandwidth with less physical requirements. Couple that with a long overdue die shrink where you get a huge increase in transistor count because of the smaller transistors and decrease in power required to run them, while not linearly related to performance it's still a good indication of how many more transistors are there to do the required math. I would say that this next generation and the adoption of DX12 may be more interesting than many of the previous years. I wouldn't be too surprised to see 970 performance under 75watts of power sometime next year.

Intel has no competition, it's why we get stagnation in the CPU world. I hope Zen changes that.

 

[GoldenX]

I hope you are right, a jump like from hd2900xt to hd3870 would be good, not another g92 but with a shrink.

 

[LightningJR]

I hope Zen delivers it's promises, I would love to have an APU only ITX pc that could game modestly well on 1920x1080.

If it's built on 16/14nm and uses HBM2 we could have powerhouse APUs. I look forward to this as well. Wouldn't expect them to be cheap though.

Put one in a laptop, would be amazing.

 

[NdMk2o1o]

Meh performance goes hand in hand with power, no PC/gaming enthusiast was ever a global warming advocate!

 

[GoldenX]

Meh performance goes hand in hand with power, no PC/gaming enthusiast was ever a global warming advocate!

You are if the required power supply is over your budget and you live in an american country with some really sh1tty economy.

 

[NdMk2o1o]

You are if the required power supply is over your budget and you live in an american country with some really sh1tty economy.

Pretty much most single GPU setups can be run off any half decent 400w PSU and those that don't it's not a problem as if you will have spent $300 on a GPU spending $100 on a PSU shouldn't be an issue, unless I'm missing something?

 

[uuuaaaaaa]

If it's built on 16/14nm and uses HBM2 we could have powerhouse APUs. I look forward to this as well. Wouldn't expect them to be cheap though.

Put one in a laptop, would be amazing.

IIRC AMD has planned some monster APU's for the server market:
http://wccftech.com/amd-x86-zen-bas...bm-memory-greenland-igpu-ddr4-memory-support/

 

[GoldenX]

It's a difference of market, here in 99% of cases we don't buy $300 hardware, be it a GPU or a CPU.
A generic 400w PSU with 15a in 12v can't sustain for example an FX6300 plus a 750ti, and there mostly aren't any good brands PSU makers with cheap offers. No one with 80% or PFC.

 

[rtwjunkie]

To my knowledge nvidia achieved that efficiency at the cost of severely "gimping" the compute power on Maxwell, nevertheless an impressive feat.

Yes, this is correct. Compute power was not needed for DX11, and they took a (correct it turns out) gamble that they could do this and maintain dominance in performance until Pascal. They surmised there would not be many dx12 games in the first year, and could weather the storm.

 

[NdMk2o1o]

I still think it's all relative whether or not you can afford higher end GPU's or not dictates if you have a PSU to meet the power requirement?

Regardless, if you look at the low end GPU market segment then you'll see that the low end cards of today can provide the same kind of performance of high end cards of yesteryear at a fragment of the cost and power requirement... unfortunately we cant have a $75 GPU that matches the high end segment of today in terms of performance and power and that will always be the way it is....

 

[ZhuI]

I still think it's all relative whether or not you can afford higher end GPU's or not dictates if you have a PSU to meet the power requirement?

Regardless, if you look at the low end GPU market segment then you'll see that the low end cards of today can provide the same kind of performance of high end cards of yesteryear at a fragment of the cost and power requirement... unfortunately we cant have a $75 GPU that matches the high end segment of today in terms of performance and power and that will always be the way it is....

Exactly. I don't know where OP gets his "these are the bad new days" meme from. The situation we have today is consistent with what we've always had. Not to sound too cruel, but the problem may be Argentina's crappy economy more so than the PC market in general.

Also, as for price and performance, the so-called "potato masher"(search for it on Youtube) is a cheap ($350) PC which rivals the performance of today's current-gen consoles. And then you add no online fee, cheaper games etc and you end up with a cheaper machine. If even that is too expensive for you then it might just be that you're too poor to be a serious gamer, at least if you want to play current AAA games, as harsh as it sounds.

 

[newtekie1]

Yeah but it's nearly 2 years old now, the 950 should have been an improvement, not a 90w card.
You don't even see them in reviews, a lot of them start with a 370/960.

2 years old or not, the 750Ti is a 28nm Maxwell card, just like the 950. There is no performance/watt improvement really possible, in fact the 950 has worse performance/watt than the 750Ti. The 950 wasn't about improving performance/watt, it was about improving performance.

To my knowledge nvidia achieved that efficiency at the cost of severely "gimping" the compute power on Maxwell, nevertheless an impressive feat.

It is really funny, IMO, how nVidia built a powerhouse GPU with a shit-ton of compute power, Fermi, and they caught an insane amount of flak for how power hungry it was. So they stripped a lot of the compute power out when they moved to Maxwell, and AMD ended up releasing GPUs with a shit-ton of compute power that are power hungry...

 

[FordGT90Concept]

I totally get what you were saying. I was looking for a R7 2## or R7 3## that was PCI Express-powered only. I think what I narrowed it down to was an R7 380 and it had a 6-pin power connector. I was very disappointed seeing that because all I wanted was a DirectX 12 card for displaying the 2D desktop.

I think the crux of the problem is the lack in manufacturing improvements. When 14-16nm cards debut, we will probably see the return of <75w cards.

 

[Toothless]

I'll be waiting for the 4-cored, 2-way SLI rig that'll run on 200w in an ITX form so I can crunch WCG and F@H and not break the bill.

 

[uuuaaaaaa]

2 years old or not, the 750Ti is a 28nm Maxwell card, just like the 950. There is no performance/watt improvement really possible, in fact the 950 has worse performance/watt than the 750Ti. The 950 wasn't about improving performance/watt, it was about improving performance.



It is really funny, IMO, how nVidia built a powerhouse GPU with a shit-ton of compute power, Fermi, and they caught an insane amount of flak for how power hungry it was. So they stripped a lot of the compute power out when they moved to Maxwell, and AMD ended up releasing GPUs with a shit-ton of compute power that are power hungry...

Despite the good performance the gtx 480 was an awful card, the 580 was good tho. Well, while being true that the amd cards eat more power than the nvidia contemporary parts it is also true that they are aging better, they just have more raw power in them, and I think with Dx12 they will really shine, because of less "crap layers" between the hardware and the applications, but that is just my feeling on it.