Yeah, all that efficiency talk stopped with Fermi, then came back in vogue briefly during pascal then was yeeted out the window soon after in time for Turing. People in this space really only cared about efficiency when it was Nvidia. Other brand is more efficient? Cool beans, they're still second place. Other brand seized the crown? Look at how power hungry/innefficient that card is! Need a nuclear reactor.
People in this thread are griping about about how much power it auch down because in their head they know it's going to cost more than they'd care to pay. If it was priced sanely. The conversation would be more along the lines of the usual "efficiency, who tf cares about efficiency? If you can afford the card you can afford to power and extra light bulb, or it's only a few cents on the electric bill". And it was even staff and moderators on this site saying things like that.
Efficiency is and was always a thing during every single day where we still had new nodes ahead of us. Efficiency at its core, determines how far you can push a node without deviating from whatever the norm in the market is, for numerous aspects of the product. Price, performance, heat, power, etc. Efficiency is also IPC. It is die size. It is featureset. Etc.
Now that the gain from a node shrink is diminishing, suddenly efficiency is out the window and we ride the marketing wave to convince ourselves we're progressing, even though there was never a day and age where hardware could last longer than today, simply because we're down to baby steps at best.
The reality is, we're not progressing, we're degressing when GPUs need substantially more power to produce playable frames in gaming. What's underneath that, is really not quite relevant. The big picture is that in a world where efficiency is key to survive (literally), we're buying into products that counter that idea. It won't last, it can't last, and the deeper we go down that rabbit hole, the bigger the hurdle to get out of it again. RT is diving straight into that hole. DLSS/FSR are clawing us back out a little bit, but the net result is still that we're in need of more power to drive content.
Its not progress. What
is progress, is the fact that GPUs keep going faster. Sure. Another bit of progress is that you can still get or create an efficient GPU. I can understand that notion too. But the commercial reality is none of those things, as
@Assimilator correctly states, because quite simply commerce is still all about more bigger faster stronger, fuck all consequences as long as we keep feeding the top 3%. The question is how far your Lemming mind wants to go before diving off the cliff.
The bottom line and fundamental question here is are you part of the 3% and if you're not, you're an idiot for feeding them further. Vote with wallet, or die - or, present a horrible future to your children.
And that principle stands in quite a few of our current commercial adventures. The responsibility to change is on us, no one else.
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