AMD: Desktop graphics card owners don’t really care about power consumption

In an interview with the resource Club386 The head of AMD Radeon Scott Herkelman (Scott Herkelman) shared the company’s views on the issue of power consumption of graphics cards and what, in their opinion, are user preferences. According to a top executive at the company, this aspect plays an important role only in the notebook segment, and many owners of desktop systems are significantly less concerned about energy efficiency.

Image source: amd.com

“The company has the initiative to deliver high performance per watt across its product range. When we launch chips, we examine the specific performance in each chart. For laptops, it is of great importance. It’s important for desktops, but not for everyone. There are people who really care about consumption, while others are not so concerned. We definitely want to develop a chip with higher performance per watt.”– said Mr. Herkelman.

“Energy efficiency is definitely a top priority. Over time you will see that we are getting better and better. We have to catch up. There are bugs that we need to fix. Idle consumption is one of them. We are sure that this can be achieved by repairing the driver. In fact, this is a difficult moment. We’re seeing some inconsistencies in idle performance that shouldn’t be occurring, and we’re working with partners to potentially fix them. This will be fixed, but it may take a little longer.— added a top manager.

Therefore, he answered Club386’s question about how much AMD cares about the lower performance of the RDNA 3 graphics compared to NVIDIA GeForce RTX 40-series graphics cards based on the Ada Lovelace microarchitecture. The journalists of the publication compared the AMD Radeon RX 7700 XT and the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070: the first graphics card has a nominal power consumption of 245 W, the second has a TGP of 200 W. At the same time, the RX 7700 XT shows a performance comparable to the RTX 4060 Ti. And that’s not an isolated case, as Tom’s hardware tests have shown: Rated power NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080 is 320 W, but mostly stays at around 300 W in games AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX With a rated power of 355 W, games require around 351 W – the trend continues with all “green” and “red” graphics cards of the latest generation.

On the other hand, most of RDNA 3’s shortcomings are offset by AMD’s competitive pricing. And it’s hard to say what the company’s management would think if its products like the AMD Radeon RX 6000 series were at the forefront of the energy efficiency race.