Quoting: Valck

Quoting: raptor85

Quoting: ArehandoroAm I the only one to think that even AMD's new cards are better than Nvidia's on power consumption, 300/355 TDP is still crazy high?

With climate change creeping up on us, current international political affairs affecting prices and availability of energy, and the market saying yes to devices like the Switch and the Deck, perhaps it's about time to demand these companies to release things more align with what the world needs.

We need to use much less energy. Not the same, and definitely not more.

There's still 100 watt and less cards on the market widely available, nobody's putting a gun to your head forcing you to get a higher end card. An extra 200 watts is also not really a lot compared to most other things in a normal household, you can literally offset that usage by not watching TV while the computer is on.

Averaged over the past year and rounded up generously, my entire single person household averaged 160 Watts. And I am confident I could reduce that by another 25% without too much effort.
Peak usage is undeniably higher when the microwave/tea kettle/washing machine are on, but they aren't for most of the time. Top consumers are the PC and the fridge, with the PC sitting at a whopping 80 right now, and hitting 200 with heavy gaming which I admittedly don't do that much these days, most of the games get by on 150ish or so.
I don't play the likes of CP77 or twitchy shooter type games, I had my fill of that crap when I was younger, but some of the sims I like do look pretty and have their respective cost in wall power.

So in summary, even "just" two hundred watts just for a GPU is insane, as are a thousand credits to pay for it, and nobody needs to commend AMD or Nvidia for not going higher still.
Consumers and marketing people alike need to get off that trainSUV, and fast. In fact, DO take the train the next time.

ED: To be fair, that number doesn't include heating, which is still fossil gas and would probably amount to about the same 150ish.figure again, and to bring that down in any meaningful way would require a massive investment in insulation on the landlord's side. Which I'm fairly certain will be coming, if and when legislation eventually requires it. So we're talking 350ish Watts instead, but still. That's one entire household's worth, just for the GPU.

On the other hand the card uses 300watts on peak, not during idle. My RX480 is rated to draw 100W but currently browsing here with a YT video playing in the background it draws about 7-10W and it's very likely that the RX7900XTX would draw even less under the same load.

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Quoting: Shmerl

Quoting: F.UltraIt's for people doing machine learning, they use GPU:s to handle the vast amounts of data so AMD, nVidia (and now Intel) are implementing new functions on their cards to improve the performance in that area. Nothing that helps the rest of us who only use these for displaying graphics and playing games.

Nothing stops games from using AI you know, for more realistic behaviors and simulation, not for graphics :)

It feels like a lot of games are running after better graphics but really almost no one is trying to improve world simulation quality.

True, I don't know if any of that game AI uses any of the ML functionality of the GPU:s yet though.

edit: AFAIK also those ML extensions have to do with the learning part of the AI research and not the end result of said research but then again I have basically zero knowledge of ML so should just shut up :)

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Quoting: jordicomaAnd I don't understand the AI accelerator part.

It's for people doing machine learning, they use GPU:s to handle the vast amounts of data so AMD, nVidia (and now Intel) are implementing new functions on their cards to improve the performance in that area. Nothing that helps the rest of us who only use these for displaying graphics and playing games.

Quoting: CyborgZetaWait, Tesla? Tesla cars have AMD GPUs in them?

The revamped S and X models have RDNA2 GPU:s in them yes: link [External Link]

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Quoting: TermyI was a bit surprised when i got the hardware survey prompt on my deck. Somehow would have thought they don't need the survey they... ^^

Technically they don't need it anywhere but they decided to make it voluntary.

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Quoting: PublicNuisance

Quoting: F.Ultra

Quoting: PublicNuisanceI am hoping for open source firmware to match the drivers; no AMD PSP and no Pluton. With the way hardware is going these days I will probably be unlucky enough to get none of my wishes.

Neither of PSP or Pluton exists on GPU:s, they are both CPU technologies. Both are also highly exaggerated by the conspiracy crowd. E.g if Microsoft wants to spy on their users they don't need to implement a whole new chip (Pluton) to do that when all of their users happily runs millions of lines of code all of which Microsoft controls to 100%.

Pluton didn't exist on their CPUs either until they put it on there, no reason to suspect they won't continue to infest other product lines with it. As for PSP it is on GPUs starting with Vega and newer from what I have gathered.

https://libreboot.org/faq.html#amd-platform-security-processor-psp [External Link]

"The Platform Security Processor (PSP) is built in on the AMD CPUs whose architecture is Late Family 16h (Puma), Zen 17h or later (and also on the AMD GPUs which are GCN 5th gen (Vega) or later)."

As for whether they are exxaggerated or not that is subjective and not relevant to my wishes above. I don't want more closed source black boxes on my hardware. I can't think of any good reason for anybody to want them. People don't want them, they tolerate them, there's a difference.

That link is wrong and I have no idea where they got that info from, PSP is a CPU feature. Perhaps they are confusing it with the CPU:S that contain a low performance GPU aka the APU:s.

There is no role on the GPU that a Pluton or PSP chip can fill, by design they have both to be on the CPU (they need to be in the pre-boot environment).

Agreed that open firmwares for both would be much better, not only for "big brother" reasons but also because we all know just how badly these things are coded so they most likely contain tons of security holes.

They are not there to spy on people though, that is the conspiracy that have made so many people constantly asking if they are included or not so that is why I falsely assumed you asking the same, sorry about that.

edit: misread what you wrote about pluton so changed that part.

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Quoting: PublicNuisanceI am hoping for open source firmware to match the drivers; no AMD PSP and no Pluton. With the way hardware is going these days I will probably be unlucky enough to get none of my wishes.

Neither of PSP or Pluton exists on GPU:s, they are both CPU technologies. Both are also highly exaggerated by the conspiracy crowd. E.g if Microsoft wants to spy on their users they don't need to implement a whole new chip (Pluton) to do that when all of their users happily runs millions of lines of code all of which Microsoft controls to 100%.

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Quoting: morbius

Quoting: F.Ultra

Quoting: morbiusI played the first game and it was so-so. Somewhat interesting premise, but an adventure at its heart. You had to go around looking for things and if you missed something, you couldn't progress until you find it.

Isn't that a "problem" with all games?!

No. Good games guide you towards what they want you to discover. In Kona, there is a magnet that you don't know that you need, hidden behind a house that you have no reason to go around back. That's just bad game design. That's how adventures from the early days of gaming used to work, no wonder that genre all but disappeared.

Ah I see now, well the drawback IMHO with more modern games is that they do too much hand holding, but yes that magnet thing is very silly indeed.

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Quoting: morbiusI played the first game and it was so-so. Somewhat interesting premise, but an adventure at its heart. You had to go around looking for things and if you missed something, you couldn't progress until you find it.

Isn't that a "problem" with all games?!

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Quoting: Purple Library GuyTrusty dogsled? Dude. There were skidoos in 1970.

They had a skidoo in the first game.

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Quoting: Purple Library GuyReally, it's amazing Google make so much money, because they are obviously pretty terrible at business. Decent at technology, but terrible at business. I guess they just were the people with the right piece of internet tech in the right place at the right time, and it doesn't matter how many other mistakes they make as long as they keep that stranglehold on search + ads.

It's kind of comforting actually, because they clearly jettisoned "don't be evil" a long time ago and want to be bastards like Facebook or early Microsoft, so if they're going to be like that I'm glad they're pretty crap at it.

Or they are actually good at business, just specifically at the search+ads business, then you add in that they make so much money on that one business that people around them constantly tell them how good they are so you start to think that you can take on any other business, and when that fails it's not because you failed (obviously since every one tells you how good you are at your business) but due to some other external factor.

I see this all the time where successful people tries to go into a completely new venture with the "how hard can it be" attitude only to find out that the answer was "more than you thought". This is probably also why most companies survives one major change in their market, but you seldom see any one survive two major changes in the market.

One locally classic example is Facit (Swedish company that could have matched IBM if things hadn't gone to shit) who had a large business in the 1930:ies with office machines such as calculators and type writers (just like IBM), in the 60:ies they even started to build main frames (11 in total if I'm not mistaken) so they both saw the future being the computer, had the money and the experts in house, yet they where basically killed over night in 1971 when the Japanese started to make electronic calculators and Facit was still selling their mechanical ones. And since they had expertise knowledgeable enough to build mainframes they obviously could have built electronic calculators, but they never did.

This is why this business theory is called the Facit trap (Facitfällan) here in Sweden. Not 100% compatible with Google since they are not experiencing a technology shift, but I think that it's the same mechanisms that explains why they keep on failing in their new businesses.

The obvious solution would have been to invest in some smaller existing game streaming service and just support them with money and resources but keep it as a separately managed entity, but they never do.

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