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
The morons working at Nvidia's R&D department have it in their minds to make these products as big & power-hungry as possible for some other weird arcane reason. Sure, higher MSRPs and profit, but that alone doesn't make much sense to me.
Overclocking for the crown of "The fastest GPU possible" always had a huge impact on consumption, especially GPU, in order to get the crown for a few percentage over the other.
Hopefully AMD can deliver on their claims and combat them
Instead they've adopted the CPU strategy - max out the silicon at all costs for max clocks and performance.
PL 60 % = 268W
268/347 = 0.77
Undervolting
232/347 = 0.67
So the 【PL60%】is super deceiving when it actually consumes 77% of the default power consumption.
60% should be~210W, now it is 28% more than advertised.
Look, 4090 was a necessary beast. Being the top dog serves so many purposes from brand image to corporate valuation.
Problem is, low-power designs get reserved for the mobile solutions, whereas desktop is left with power hogs. It's been too many years we don't see a good <75W, cordless, low-profile cards. Both NVIDIA and AMD... Such a shame, when they are very much able.