Thursday, December 1st 2022
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 with Nearly Half its Power-limit and Undervolting Loses Just 8% Performance
The monstrous NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 "Ada" graphics card has the potential to be a very efficient high-end graphics card with a daily-use undervolt, and with its power-limit halved, finds an undervolting adventure review by Korean tech publication Quasar Zone. The reviewer tested the RTX 4090 with a number of GPU core voltage settings, and lowered software-level power-limits (down from its 450 W default).
It's important to note that 450 W is a very arbitrary number for the RTX 4090's power limit, the GPU rarely draws that much power in typical gaming workloads. Our own testing at stock settings sees its gaming power draw around the 340 W-mark. Quasar Zone tested the RTX 4090 with a power limit as low as 60% (270 W). With its most aggressive power management they could muster (i.e. 270 W PL), the card was found to lose just around 8% of performance at 4K UHD, averaged across five AAA games at maxed out settings. The story is similar with undervolting the GPU down to 850 mV, down from its 1 V stock. In both cases, the performance loss appear well contained, while providing a reduction in power-draw (in turn heat and noise).
Sources:
VideoCardz, Quasar Zone
It's important to note that 450 W is a very arbitrary number for the RTX 4090's power limit, the GPU rarely draws that much power in typical gaming workloads. Our own testing at stock settings sees its gaming power draw around the 340 W-mark. Quasar Zone tested the RTX 4090 with a power limit as low as 60% (270 W). With its most aggressive power management they could muster (i.e. 270 W PL), the card was found to lose just around 8% of performance at 4K UHD, averaged across five AAA games at maxed out settings. The story is similar with undervolting the GPU down to 850 mV, down from its 1 V stock. In both cases, the performance loss appear well contained, while providing a reduction in power-draw (in turn heat and noise).
64 Comments on NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 with Nearly Half its Power-limit and Undervolting Loses Just 8% Performance
back in the 28nm era there was this lingering promise things could keep going smaller and more efficient alongside overall progress in performance. Honestly... I still value a more silent rig over one that gets 10 FPS more and/or can push a game slider to very high... and we shouldn't have to buy into a higher end card and undervolting it massively to achieve that.
At some point we got cards released in both ways; not only higher clocked AIB product, but also less performant & smaller form factor. Nobody ever complained about that segment, but somehow, it vanished. Hope we see a return to it, Ada and 3 slot behemoths definitely open up a niche.
For 10% performance loss you cut its PL from 450W to 300W.
This is 60% of the power limit of 450W which is exactly 270W.
This test is flawed since the gpu was not properly loaded up in the first place. Undervolting still is quite beneficial, but not more than it always have been on other GPUs.
What I disagree with is the price, this is not a Titan, plus it costs about twice the 3090, making it mediocre performance/features wise.
I can undervolt my 6800 xt while overclocking it and have ~60w lower power draw at ~6% higher performance than stock. this is nothing new.pretty standard, all cards come overvolted out of the factory so that even the worst bins are capable of operating at the advertised boost clocks... but I'm sure you already know this :)
But none of this is new, so I'm a little confused why it's suddenly news here and at videocardz (and wherever else picked this up). Maybe because the numbers this time are so shocking? But they're bogus.
And then they've also compared with setting various power limits as well. Which highlights the lopsidedness.
It was deceiving because they drawn the 8% loss conclusion based on not actually 60% power consumption but around 67 - 77%
If they could find a workload which utilizes full 450W power limit, then compare it againt the PL60%.
I am pretty sure it is not 8% performance lost.
AMD's been doing the same a couple of weeks ago - any time nvidia would announce something, or reviews would start piling up, AMD would announce a rehash of the same information that they'd posted before (vram capacity, clock speeds, etc.) - all for the sake of getting people to think of their products via simple visibility
and look, it's working - you're sitting here wondering wtf this article's point is, others can't stop jizzing over generic GPU stuff - less voltage = much less power draw at minimal performance loss up until a certain point WOW
From W1zzard's review.
That Korean test used 5 games, Cyberpunk 2077 was a part of It, but RT and DLSS3 was enabled, so such a lower power consumption is not surprising.
More interesting is TPU review, where power consumption is only 76W with V-sync enabled in Cyberpunk without RT or DLSS, but performance hit was ~55-60%, because clockspeed was only ~787 MHz.
Nvidia probably estimated their 4090 would easily use 450W+ that they requested AIBs to make 450W+ cooler, but AD102 turned out to be more efficiency than Nvidia had thought.
The other thing to take into consideration are the safety margin. Maybe 20% of the card would perform like that with less power, but not all. By using that amount of power, they can get higher yield by making sure as much chip as possible run properly. Some card maybe have even more heardroom to undervolt. Some might not.
477 watts with Ray tracing on.
277 watts with RT on plus DLSS only because one hell of a CPU bottleneck, it should be avoided as an example.