GPUs & CPUs & Enthusiast hardware: Questions, Discussion and fanboy slap-fights - Nvidia & AMD & Intel - Separe but Equal. Intel rides in the back of the bus.

[The Ugly One]

We haven't had any consumer graphics card with the power draw of the 4090 or 5090. It is an entirely unprecedented level of power draw in a consumer GPU outside of meme shit like the Radeon Pro Vega II with its proprietary Apple power connector. The entire reason the cable exists is that 8 pin PCIE power cables are only configured to provide 150W, meaning that 5090 would need at least four of them which is just infeasible for the way the PCBs are designed.

Part of the problem is such retardedly high power-draws in consumer equipment in the first place and part of the problem is that Nvidia somehow sold the PCI SIG on standardizing around a design that just barely meets the specifications of what it's supposed to do.

In a saner world, AMD and Intel would have immediately launched a competing high-power standard and fought Nvidia's connector becoming an ATX standard but alas...

What if we just, and now hear me out here, crazy idea--didn't consume enough power to kill a farm animal just to play games?

 

[Get the rope Macaulay!]

If the AI bubble pops

i doubt it will, next year they're saying AGI and 3 years from now ASI (meaning what they originally meant by AGI) plus the tariffs will make GPUs even more valuable. gaming is more likely to die out as a use case for GPUs over AI at this point. as people have been saying, a 3060 is enough for most games.

 

[Fcret]

What if we just, and now hear me out here, crazy idea--didn't consume enough power to kill a farm animal just to play games?

The market has already shown it doesn't care about power consumption by rewarding nvidia and AMD for releasing flagships with increasingly retarded TBPs. I expect by 2035 we'll have kilowatt TBPs and 600W cards will be the new efficiency kings.

(fwiw I agree with you)

 

[Mister Fister]

The market has already shown it doesn't care about power consumption by rewarding nvidia and AMD for releasing flagships with increasingly retarded TBPs. I expect by 2035 we'll have kilowatt TBPs and 600W cards will be the new efficiency kings.

(fwiw I agree with you)

The also ridiculous effect is that these 4090s and 5090s easily undervolt to where it's something like 95-99% of the power for 2/3rds to 3/4th the power consumption. It's not like these cards are starved for computing power.

 

[Just Some Other Guy]

Meh I'm don't really care if people want to burn a bunch of power to play vidya or even to just do benchmarks.

It's their power, whatever. The parts should be up to their rated task though, and cards of the past did it better.

 

[macrodegenerate]

i doubt it will, next year they're saying AGI and 3 years from now ASI (meaning what they originally meant by AGI) plus the tariffs will make GPUs even more valuable. gaming is more likely to die out as a use case for GPUs over AI at this point. as people have been saying, a 3060 is enough for most games.

A 3060 is great for AI on the cheap. You can run SDXL on that boy EZPZ. Man the 3060 ti is the red headed step child of the 3000 series next to the 3070 which is almost as bad.

 

[Slav Power]

Notorious Caveman Beve Sturke has released a video talking about the 50 series ROP disaster.

 

[The Mass Shooter Ron Soye]

Notorious Caveman Beve Sturke has released a video talking about the 50 series ROP disaster.

He argued that Nvidia was either incompetent or knew about the problem and shipped anyway (there's no way). But the 5080 portion seems to have been added to the video last minute since it's breaking news, and points to a different technical explanation since it's supposed to be a fully enabled die. Maybe this is fixable with a firmware/driver update.

Other issues like the use of the shitty power cable with a low safety margin are intentional.

 

[The Ugly One]

A 3060 is great for AI on the cheap. You can run SDXL on that boy EZPZ. Man the 3060 ti is the red headed step child of the 3000 series next to the 3070 which is almost as bad.

$700 for a 5-year-old 8 GB card is cheap in 2025.

 

[Slav Power]

$700 for an 8 GB card is cheap in 2024.

There is the 12GB SKU of the 3060 as well, but also used 3090's go for ~$750 here, and that gets you 24GB of VRAM with roughly 4070Ti performance, minus the AV1 encoder and better power efficiency. Given the current state of the market it's basically a steal.

At this rate people will have to take the risk and buy used, and at the rate of Nvidia's fuckups, it might end up less risky than trying to get a brand new card.

 

[The Ugly One]

There is the 12GB SKU of the 3060 as well, but also used 3090's go for ~$750 here

Do they still today? As of about 24 hours ago, i was thinking of a 3060 Ti as a nice $300 card, a 4060 as a $400 card, and a used 3090 as a, uh...

 

[Slav Power]

Do they still today? As of about 24 hours ago, i was thinking of a 3060 Ti as a nice $300 card, a 4060 as a $400 card, and a used 3090 as a, uh...


View attachment 7023459

Emphasis on "here". Used 3090's pop up online for around 3000PLN, so ~$760 give or take. Will probably change soon but you could get a used 3090 for ~1000PLN less than a brand new 4070Ti. And by used I mean refurbished with warranty and standard EU 14-day online purchase return policy.

 

[The Mass Shooter Ron Soye]

AMD teases Radeon RX 9070 focusing on sub-$700 price point (archive)


The comment section is going nuts.

Since PhysX Games Are A Problem On NVIDIA RTX 50 GPUs, This User Combined RTX 5090 With RTX 3050 To Solve The Performance Issue (archive)

With the dropping of support for 32-bit PhysX in the Blackwell series, a user tried to fix the performance problem by adding another NVIDIA GPU that comes with PhysX support. The Redditor u/jerubedo tried adding a GeForce RTX 3050 to his gaming PC alongside the GeForce RTX 5090 (this isn't SLI) and dedicated the RTX 3050 strictly for PhysX processes in the NVIDIA Control Panel.

He then ran and benchmarked a couple of PhysX-based games, including Mafia II Classic, Batman Arkham Asylum, Borderlands 2, Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag, and Mirror's Edge. The final results show an improvement of up to 1425%.

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole 2]

Idk, feels like Nvidia is just getting sloppy and saying "Whatchu gonna do 'bout it, bish?"

Nice. The tried and true Adobe / Autodesk gambit. Your problem doesn't exist and even if it did we're certainly not going to admit by providing a solution in our KB. But... there's a ten year old thread in our forum with instructions on how to fix a fifteen year old problem that still exists in the current version under certain circumstances.

The comment section is going nuts.

Since PhysX Games Are A Problem On NVIDIA RTX 50 GPUs, This User Combined RTX 5090 With RTX 3050 To Solve The Performance Issue (archive)

That last part has been around for a long time, using a secondary GPU as the dedicated PhysX processor(remember when PhysX was a card on it's own?) so I'm not surprised.

 

[Squatty Potty]

Framework Announces New Gaming Mini Desktop
Framework unveiled an AMD AI Max+ 395 mini ITX PC w/ 128gb of RAM for $1999.

It runs at 120W and can boost to 140W. You can also cluster it to run larger LLM's locally like Deepseek R1 671B. There's also a base model with an Ryzen AI Max 385 w/ 32gb of RAM for $1099.

 

[The Ugly One]

AMD teases Radeon RX 9070 focusing on sub-$700 price point (archive)
View attachment 7023793

The comment section is going nuts.

Since PhysX Games Are A Problem On NVIDIA RTX 50 GPUs, This User Combined RTX 5090 With RTX 3050 To Solve The Performance Issue (archive)

This was a real eyeroll:

Nonetheless, even though NVIDIA specified that the series won't support 32-bit CUDA applications, it didn't explicitly state that they are dropping the PhysX support on the RTX 50 series.

Nonetheless, even though my local convenience store specified that they were no longer stocking Pepsico products, it didn't explicitly state that it was dropping Mountain Dew.

 

[Prehistoric Jazz]

remember when PhysX was a card on it's own?

Mine is on the wall, along with my S3 Savage 4, my Geforce 2 MX, my HD3870s x2s and my old Trident chip from the first rig in 93? 94?

 

[Fcret]

remember when PhysX was a card on it's own

I could never justify buying one. Hell, I could never justify turning it on in games even with it built in to the GPU because it absolutely murdered your frametimes even though the average FPS looked fine.

 

[Betonhaus]

What i don't get is why we haven't explored double-height video cards intended for being mounted parallel with the motherboard with a risor card. something like this:
standard gpu on top, double height gpu below. instead of relying on the slot to support the weight it can be screwed down in all four corners

 

[Fcret]

What i don't get is why we haven't explored double-height video cards intended for being mounted parallel with the motherboard with a risor card. something like this:
standard gpu on top, double height gpu below. instead of relying on the slot to support the weight it can be screwed down in all four corners
View attachment 7026013

Because it's not supported by the ATX standards which means any company making such a thing would have a severely limited userbase to sell into. I'm not even sure what problem this would solve.