Sam Naffziger, AMD’s Senior Vice President, suggested in an interview with Tomshardware that the Radeon RX 7000 series graphics cards’ next-generation RDNA 3 GPUs will use more power than existing alternatives while still delivering 50 percent better performance per watt. Both AMD and NVIDIA are anticipated to put a significant emphasis on efficiency and GPU power design in order for their next-generation GPUs to offer improved performance.

There have been several leaks for NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 40 series graphics cards, which are expected to feature up to 600W designs. Even though AMD asserted that the RDNA 3 ‘Radeon RX’ has a performance per watt gain of more than 50% over the previous generation, the company believes that this doesn’t rule out the possibility of higher power requirements.

“It’s really the fundamentals of physics that are driving this,” Naffziger explained. “The demand for gaming and compute performance is, if anything, just accelerating, and at the same time, the underlying process technology is slowing down pretty dramatically — and the improvement rate. So the 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.”

“Performance is king,” stated Naffziger, “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.” — Sam Naggziger (AMD’s SVP & Product Technology Architect) via Tomshardware

There were rumors that the AMD RDNA 3-powered Radeon RX 7000 series might have TDPs as high as 400W.

Comparing that to the current Navi 21 GPU’s 335W output, there is an increase of 100W. (Navigation 21 KXTX) If AMD wants to achieve a 2x performance gain over its present chip range, the TDP should be near to 450W, which is the same as the one suggested for the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 BFGPU. When Sam says that the competition will have to boost the power higher (a lot higher) than they will, he sounds reasonably sure. Peak power and operational power may differ significantly at the same time.

The new PCIe Gen 5 connectors will also be required for next-generation graphics cards with TBPs of 400-450W because triple 8-pin connectors can only sustain up to 450W and no manufacturer has chosen that design, at least for reference cards (yet). Since the new PCIe Gen 5 connector complies with ATX 3.0 standards and offers dependable performance, it is unclear from the AMD camp whether the company intends to employ the triple 8-pin connector or the latter.

As the AMD Radeon RX 7000 series graphics cards, which are based on the RDNA 3 GPU architecture, are scheduled to go on sale later this year, expect more information in the following months.