WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:05.360 Pointless! That's how a lot of people these days would describe high wattage power supplies that 00:00:05.360 --> 00:00:10.160 promise you a thousand watts or more of power with an unreasonably high price tag. 00:00:10.160 --> 00:00:14.040 They used to be more common when people rocked multiple graphics cards in their rig, but 00:00:14.040 --> 00:00:19.080 as SLI and Crossfire fell out of favor due to stability and performance issues, so did 00:00:19.080 --> 00:00:24.640 those hefty power supplies. But are the days coming where they might be relevant once again? 00:00:24.720 --> 00:00:30.200 Yeah, they very well may be, if trends in graphics card power continue the way they're 00:00:30.200 --> 00:00:35.320 going. And if you haven't paid super close attention to exactly what's going on in GPU land, 00:00:35.320 --> 00:00:40.200 this might seem surprising, considering power efficiency has been a huge trend across electronics. 00:00:40.200 --> 00:00:44.280 I mean, we're getting to the point where it's disappointing if a high-end smartphone 00:00:44.280 --> 00:00:49.280 only gives you one day of battery life, and the latest Apple Silicon-equipped MacBook 00:00:49.280 --> 00:00:56.560 Pros boast over twenty hours. And although we don't run our desktop gaming rigs off of batteries, graphics cards have 00:00:56.560 --> 00:01:02.160 been getting more efficient. But the issue is that although the number of frames you get per watt of power has been 00:01:02.160 --> 00:01:06.160 increasing, the total power has also been increasing. 00:01:06.160 --> 00:01:09.920 Not to mention the fact that both chip makers and game developers keep pushing the boundaries 00:01:09.920 --> 00:01:13.600 of visual fidelity. It's just always more photorealistic. 00:01:13.600 --> 00:01:22.080 Give me some block graphics, it's okay. Just a few years ago, NVIDIA's then-top-end Titan XP drew around 250 watts at load, with 00:01:22.080 --> 00:01:26.200 AMD's competing Radeon 7 weighing in at 300 watts. 00:01:26.200 --> 00:01:33.280 But now, Team Red's current best, the Radeon RX6950XT, has increased to 330 watts, while 00:01:33.280 --> 00:01:38.840 NVIDIA's 3090TI has a TDP of a whopping 450 watts. 00:01:38.840 --> 00:01:43.800 May as well have just come out of a flame broiler. Toasted GPU. 00:01:43.800 --> 00:01:48.880 And the expectation is that the upcoming RTX 4080, featuring NVIDIA's new Ada Lovelace 00:01:48.880 --> 00:01:54.920 architecture, could clock in at around 400 or 500 watts, while the 4090 could suck down 00:01:54.920 --> 00:01:58.160 as much as 600 watts of power on its own. 00:01:58.160 --> 00:02:02.080 Now, one big reason that manufacturers might not be paying too much attention to how much 00:02:02.080 --> 00:02:06.760 power their cards are guzzling is simply because they don't particularly have to. 00:02:06.760 --> 00:02:11.240 I mean, sure, you can advertise a desktop card as being power efficient or having a 00:02:11.240 --> 00:02:15.080 good cooling solution, but at the end of the day, the thing that's going to sell cards 00:02:15.080 --> 00:02:18.920 is performance. Vroom vroom. 00:02:18.920 --> 00:02:23.440 AMD and NVIDIA would much rather compete on FPS benchmarks than trying to one-up the 00:02:23.440 --> 00:02:28.640 other company by saying, hey, our GPU uses 15% less power. 00:02:28.640 --> 00:02:34.200 And this trend might continue due to the rise of chiplets in CPUs and GPUs instead of the 00:02:34.200 --> 00:02:37.440 use of one big monolithic chip die. 00:02:37.440 --> 00:02:41.680 If you don't know, chiplets are modular chip pieces that can be combined to act as 00:02:41.680 --> 00:02:46.520 a single processor and are gaining popularity in fabs because they have better yield, meaning 00:02:46.520 --> 00:02:51.120 a defect on the wafer will only affect one small chiplet rather than a whole complete 00:02:51.120 --> 00:02:57.160 processor. It's likely that chiplets will allow companies to build bigger GPUs more profitably, something 00:02:57.160 --> 00:03:01.760 that AMD in particular seems quite interested in, and we can't rule out that NVIDIA may 00:03:01.760 --> 00:03:08.320 move in that direction someday either. Of course, this doesn't mean there isn't an upper limit to how much power a card of 00:03:08.320 --> 00:03:15.400 the future will draw. High wattage power supplies are expensive, and expecting folks to save up for both an 00:03:15.400 --> 00:03:22.080 expensive GPU as well as a $200-plus dollar power supply might just be too much to ask. 00:03:22.080 --> 00:03:26.120 Not to mention companies that build pre-built PCs won't be too happy about having to spend 00:03:26.120 --> 00:03:31.480 extra money on nicer power supplies, which they've traditionally cheaped out on. 00:03:31.480 --> 00:03:36.440 And even though there are plenty of spacious gaming-oriented cases on the market, an insanely 00:03:36.440 --> 00:03:41.840 high wattage card means a super bulky cooling solution that would take up an unpalatable 00:03:41.840 --> 00:03:46.040 amount of space or spit out unacceptable amounts of heat. 00:03:46.040 --> 00:03:51.920 Not ideal if you're in a small, poorly ventilated room like you are right now. 00:03:51.920 --> 00:03:55.120 Hey, that's the end of this video, guys. Thanks for watching. 00:03:55.120 --> 00:04:00.400 Like it if you liked it, dislike it if you disliked it. Check out our other videos, comment below with video suggestions, and don't forget 00:04:00.440 --> 00:04:04.360 to subscribe and follow. You got all that? I'm not going to repeat myself.