Nvidia’s RTX 4090 won’t be nearly as power-hungry as feared, according to fresh speculation which also insists that AMD’s next-gen GPUs are ‘disappointing’ compared to Lovelace from Team Green.
This is the latest word from one of the regular hardware leakers on Twitter, Kopite7kimi, who summarized some of the purported specs of the RTX 4090, with a notable change in the power usage.
OK, let’s do a new summary. RTX 4090, AD102-300, 16128FP32, 21Gbps 24G GDDR6X, 450W, ~2×3090. I am disappointed with RDNA3. That’s all.May 16, 2022
As you can see, the claim is that the RTX 4090 will run with 126 streaming multiprocessors, meaning 16,128 CUDA cores, with a 450W power usage. Kopite7kimi also repeated recent claims that the Lovelace flagship will offer around double the performance of the RTX 3090, and will come with 24GB of GDDR6X VRAM (running at 21Gbps).
The final part of the tweet will make bleak reading for AMD, and simply states: “I am disappointed with RDNA3. That’s all.”
Ouch, in a word.
Analysis: Reasons to be doubtful?
What’s so disappointing about AMD, then? The leaker doesn’t elaborate on that, despite being prodded numerous times by other denizens of Twitter to explain further as to why exactly RDNA 3 is not shaping up so well.
We can guess that presumably it’s wrapped up in the relative performance levels versus Nvidia Lovelace, and maybe with the RTX 4090 coming in with lesser power requirements, the rumor about AMD being leaps and bounds ahead in efficiency terms is no longer as compelling either.
Remember, the RTX 4090 was previously claimed to be chugging down around 600W of power (even more with older rumors), and 450W looks a heck of a lot more palatable than that. Don’t get us wrong, it’s still a lot, but in fact it’s the same as the RTX 3090 Ti, while delivering double the performance of the RTX 3090 – which would be impressive. (Assuming all this is correct, of course, and stay highly skeptical about this leakage at this point).
If the RTX 4090 is going to use a quarter less power than was thought, we can further guess that it’d make sense that RTX 4000 graphics cards further down the range will also be tamer in respect of their demands on the PSU – so the RTX 4070 which has previously been pinned with a 300W consumption could end up at less than that.
Another advantage Nvidia might have comes with another fresh rumor just aired, namely that Team Green is set to spring its next-gen GPUs considerably sooner than expected, and we could see some kind of launch early in Q3 – we’re talking July, apparently. Presumably that will just be an initial reveal, but Nvidia is now expected to get the jump on RDNA 3, and maybe by some distance – which again could be partly why Kopite7kimi sees ‘disappointment’ in the cards for AMD when talking about the near future of the GPU world.
We’ll just have to see, although it would be foolish to get carried away with any notion that AMD has lost the battle of the next-gen GPUs at this point, particularly when things are still so up in the air with rumors around Team Red’s RX 7000 products.
At the moment, the rumor mill can’t even decide whether the flagship RDNA 3 graphics card will have dual GPUs, or not, but that could be taken as another indication of AMD’s next-gen products not being that close to arrival (seeing as speculation from leakers tends to have at least the basics nailed as the launch of a GPU range approaches).
