According to AMD exec – but that doesn’t mean RX 7000 GPUs won’t be seriously efficient
spoke to Sam Naffziger, Senior VP, Corporate Fellow and Product Technology Architect at AMD, about the next-gen GPUs on topics which included power consumption.
Naffziger observed that the demand for better gaming performance is accelerating, while process technology improvements are slowing down ‘dramatically’ at the same time, and that this meant: “Power levels are just going to keep going up. Now, we’ve got a multi-year roadmap of very significant efficiency improvements to offset that curve, but the trend is there.
to the tune of 50% compared to current RDNA 2 graphics cards – a huge efficiency gain and one comparable to the progress made from RDNA to RDNA 2. Naffziger elaborated: “Performance is king, but even if our designs are more power-efficient, that doesn’t mean you don’t push power levels up if the competition is doing the same thing. It’s just that they’ll have to push them a lot higher than we will.”
In other words, Nvidia pushing hard with power consumption to get more raw performance means AMD has to do the same to play catch-up – so we can expect more power-hungry cards this time round with the RX 7000 range, for sure. But the key point Naffziger is of course making is that Nvidia will have to go a lot higher power-wise, with less achieved on the efficiency front with its next-gen Lovelace cards .