AMD reportedly removed performance-per-watt graphs that compared the RX 7900 XTX and 7900 XT graphics cards against Nvidia’s RTX 4090 from previous presentations of the GPUs, as noted by ComputerBase. According to AMD’s annotations from its performance presentation on November 15, there was intended to be a performance-per-watt slide comparing the power efficiency of the RX 7900 XTX and RTX 4090, but AMD never showed it. The “RX-841” footnote, which lacks a corresponding slide in the deck, makes the omission obvious.
Based on publicly known peak power consumption numbers (TBP/TGP), the performance-per-watt slide compares the RX 7900 XTX to Nvidia’s notoriously power-hungry GeForce RTX 4090. AMD apparently decided to exclude the slide at the last minute after mistakenly leaving this footnote in its presentation.
We don’t know why AMD opted to remove this slide, and there could be a number of explanations for the deletion.
First, AMD has stated that the RX 7900 XTX competes with the RTX 4080, therefore comparing it to the RTX 4090 may have been unnecessary. Furthermore, while Nvidia’s 40-series cards consume enormous amounts of energy, the new design is more power efficient than its predecessors, and the 40-series cards frequently utilise significantly less energy than the complete TGP during gaming.
Nvidia also sought to emphasise that their GPUs do not draw the full TGP during gaming, noting that the RTX 4080 may consume only 251W of power under average gaming conditions. This is a significant achievement given that Nvidia’s previous-generation RTX 3090 Ti consumes 398W during moderate gaming workloads. This equates to a 37% power decrease for the RTX 4080, and it doesn’t even take into account the 4080’s marginally faster gaming performance.
It becomes sense to assume that AMD’s upcoming RDNA 3 GPUs will easily match or surpass the 40-series in terms of power efficiency measures. AMD would want to make sure that their card had a healthy enough lead, though, as with other launch presentations, to stress the benefits of its architecture. Perhaps the results of the comparison with the RTX 4090 weren’t exactly as favourable as AMD had hoped. On the other hand, AMD might have determined that it wasn’t the best strategy to compare the two cards just based on their overall power ratings because the RTX 4090 probably doesn’t draw its full TGP while gaming. Additionally, the RX 7900 XTX rivals the RTX 4080 more directly.
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