fillet said:
7800GTX easily gobbled up 250w+ during peak load. All top end graphics cards for the past 5 years or so have had a power consumption of between 200-300w give or take a few watts. The power requirments haven't gone up, the manufacturing process has shurnk which reduces power consumption but transistor count has increased (obviously) which increases power consumption, they work to a target peak and the Titan is nowhere abnormal relative to it's power. It basically offers 50% performance increase for nowhere near 50% increased power consumption Vs say a crossfire/SLI design which eats 100% more power for basically 60-65% increase in performance. Of course with crossfire/SLI you get good old microstutter making it worthless. The Gefore TiTAN is nothing short of a marvel in terms of performance and power, to say otherwise is extremely ignorant and shows a complete lack knowledge of where things are currently. AMD doesn't have anything ready to compete with it and won't do for about 6-12 months! ...Now the price, that's something entirely different, that's not good at all and stinks of a cash in. Also, the power consumption in the PS4 being similar to the PS3 is completely expected, as outlined already, the die process shrinks, the transistor count increases, each balancing out to reach a power envelope that is manaeable. AMD have done well with their low end - mid-range APUs, but don't be fooled there's nothing special going on here, top end parts still have massive power draws from both AMD and nVidia. And rightly so, because if they didn't, they wouldn't be maximizing the design to it's limits. Which is what the PC graphics card industry is all about and these days the console graphics card solutions - are the PC solutions. AMD low power APUs = PS4/Xbox 720. These are not high end parts, the important thing to remember as well is that performance Vs power consumption doesn't follow a linear increase, when you get to the top end the "performance per watt" decreases and plateaus off as expected and as all components in the electronic industry do. Low power designs are optimized for low power consumption (obviously), high power designs are optimized for high power with little regard for power consumption (obviously). |
I think you are confused with total system power consumption, 7800 gtx used about 80W:
The 7900 GT even lowered that to 50W while delivering high-end performance, and a 7950 GX2 used about 110w-120w. That's a dual gpu card using just over 100W! Power consumption really started to boom about two years later though, and it was mostly Nvidia cards becoming very power hungry.