That's a ridiculous level of performance. But it's not that great, given it's 50% more power hungry than a 2080ti. Progress is meant to bring efficiency, not brute force. I know lots of people dont give a crap about energy efficiency, but it is the future of technology. So, in a way, this is a step backwards, just like the 3090. I'm happy to miss this generation.
Ever since ray tracing was brought up, enregy efficieny has taken a step backwards, the reason why 3080 is faster than a 2080Ti is because it consumes more power. now 350w consumer GPUs are becoming mainstream which further increases the size and weight of the coolers and PSU requirements, it was this gen that we started to see 4 slot coolers and that tells you something.
"Should be" and "is" are as far apart from each other in GPU market as possible. Just check how high-end GPU coolers looked 15 years ago - small heatsink with 40mm fan installed. Each generation of GPU brings more efficiency, but also raw power increase over the said efficiency gains, that's why we ended up with chungus cards right now.
And that is very bad, when triple slot coolers started to be common, motherboard vendors made metal reinforced PCIe slots, now we see GPUs that come with support brackets in their box, there should be a limit, otherwise this ridiculousness wont stop
AMD loves to ignore power efficiency and overvolt/overclock everything by default. You certainly won't find efficiency in a factory OC version of a product whose stock version is already so far beyond the efficiency sweet spot on the clock/voltage curve!
I believe the only reason AMD managed to catch up to Nvidia in efficiency this gen, is because Nvidia have not made that much improvements in power efficiency since RTX 2000 series, all there R&D efforts have gone to RT cores and Tensore cores, however gaming performance for watt have been not so much improved, and what they did instead, increased power draw from 250w to 350w.
Fast card but wow the heat, power consumption and price to get those last few % !! 391w gaming and 600+w spikes, and a nuclear hole in your wallet, yikes.
Still, good on you AMD for making the darn thing in the first place, because why not I guess.
yeah, all of us who said, 650w were good enough for single GPU high end systems look like fools right now, but some of the blame goes to AMD and mostly Nvidia, for not making the generational improvements in efficiency that we'v come to expect