The RTX 4090 Power Target makes No Sense - But the Performance is Mind-Blowing

foreign welcome back to a new video today finally RTX 4090 launch at least the finals Edition I spent many many days and hours getting all the data for today's video it's a huge script if you want to get uh too long didn't watch then I can summarize it with the 4090 being about 40 to 80 percent faster than a 30 90 TI at the same power consumption so we are not talking about 600 watt power consumption on the 4090 it's more in the region of 400 to 450 Watt that's The quick summary but there is a lot more behind that a lot more things we tested a lot of gaming data and also a lot of power consumption data which will definitely be very interesting and some things Nvidia might have to reconsider we are straight jumping into 3D time spy extreme GT1 for a first estimate and I can tell you when I was running those first tests I had to double check all the settings because I was like WTF Nvidia what is going on just compared to an RTX 30 or RX 6000 series that's almost twice the performance one quick note for the start we did not have the time to include an RX 6000 card into our testing simply because we did not have enough time to do it we only started with an RTX 3080 TI and with 309 DTI for comparison but since we kind of know how let's say a 6950 XT is compared to like a 3080 TI or 39 DTI I think you can still draw your conclusion continuing with Battlefield 2042 as our first gaming Benchmark in all benchmarks that we are performing today you can see yellow marked the average FPS in our charts brownish you can find the minimum FPS also called one percent low and bluish you can see the power consumption of the card in what the performance of the 4090 is about 43 above the 3090 TI in this test and now if we add the power consumption of the card it is getting really interesting because you would first estimate that the 4090 will draw at least 450 maybe up to 600 watt but that seems to be not the case and especially not in gaming that is what you can see here with the 4090 consuming about 27 less than a 3090 TI while performing about 43 percent faster taking the 3090 TI as direct competitor to the 4090 is also kind of difficult simply because the 3090 TI had such a bad ratio of performance to power consumption if you especially take the 3080 TI and compare it to the 4090 it often looks quite a bit different that's why in some charts we took the 3090 TI as like direct comparison and also the 3080 ti so if we now switch over from the comparison of 4090 and 390 TI to the 3080 TI you can see that the power consumption is slightly increasing by about five percent but at the same time the performance increases from 43 to 55 percent following our Battlefield Benchmark scene you will see that the power consumption of the 4090 is always somewhere between 300 and 340 Watt on average we measured a power consumption of 323 watt also another hint today we will only do 4K benchmarks simply because the 4090 has such a high performance that in my opinion it doesn't really make much sense especially to use 1080P and even with wqhd you will run into the CPU bottleneck with some titles and that's why we decided only to go for 4K benchmarks the power consumption data which you just saw for example in Battlefield is taken with thermal Grizzlies wire view that's an unpublished product which we've been working on for over half year now it's almost ready to be published ready to launch not quite yet but it's ready for me to use in videos like this because it's very helpful right now during The Benchmark I can get the actual power consumption of the card and it's not only like a 100 degree adapter for better cable management but at the same time you can read out everything the card is doing so we can cycle through because it's not only measuring but also locking the data so for example you can get obviously the power consumption which is by adding up the voltage and the current you can read out Min and Max values but for me most helpful is the average reading the average reading is done by locking the data of the previous 60 seconds and then underneath you can also read out the total power consumed of the card fortunately Igor from Igor's lab could confirm to us that the 4090 is indeed only pulling about 10 watt over the PCI Express slot directly as gpuc is reporting this means that we can either neglect the 10 watt or we can add it up later if we want to if you want to see more detailed analysis about 490 power consumption it would definitely make sense that you will check out Igor's stuff at launch as well going over to Remnant From the Ashes In 4K Ultra it's a little bit older title and it's still not using dlss in our Benchmark we can see similar results compared to Battlefield 2042 the performance increase is at about 41 over 30 90 TI while the power console assumption decreased by about 20 percent but again here if we would have compared it with the 3080 TI instead the power consumption would have increased by 16 but the performance would have also increased by 53 percent again the 490 consumes a little bit less power than expected in this native rendered 4K scene the poor consumption of the card was always between about 300 and 370 watt while measuring with wire view over an average of 60 seconds with 358 watt out of personal interest obviously we will include pubg to the testing we are running Esports settings and 4K resolution and even with 4K this means this is going to be a high FPS title in today's test Esports settings by the way means that we will neglect anything that will help us making the game look nicer but instead it's optimized so you can see the enemies much better with almost 500 FPS on average even with 4K resolution solution you will definitely need some strong CPU power and if you would switch to wqhd you would be fully inside the CPU limit compared to a 38 DTI the power consumption increased by 37 percent but we also have much more performance by 85 percent the power consumption of the RTX 4090 in pubg was on average 423 Watts by the way all the testing which we did in today's video was performed on this platform which is still the older 12900 KS but it's still a very quick CPU originally I wanted to switch to am5 with the 7950x but then Nvidia stated in the review guide that you might lose performance on some benchmarks with AMD there might be some kind of weird conflict right now and simply for the release video I did not want to risk to get false data and that's why I decided to go for the 1200 KS instead already during the keynote of the 4090 you could feel that Nvidia has is putting a heavy priority on dlss3 and before we're going to judge the technology I think we will just get straight to it and look at some comparison numbers Nvidia are provided a special version of the 3D mic which is including a dlss feature test this dlss feature test basically runs twice once with dlss enabled and once with disabled I captured the entire footage and now we can try to spot some differences especially if both tests are running after each other and not next to each other for me personally it's almost impossible to tell which test is with dlss and which is without dlss only if you pay close attention to some details you can spot some differences for example if the ship is landing in this situation try to pay attention to the left up area where you can see the edges of the ship with active dlss3 those seem to be a little bit sharper than without the LSS without dlss the image generally seems to be a bit more smooth but I personally would actually prefer the ones that's a bit more sharp you can definitely let me know what you think about it and maybe do that after we watched all the other comparison footages even taking the small differences into account you have to agree that without the LSS and only 57 FPS that is not enough FPS for a 4k 144hz monitor and with DLS S3 and about 173 FPS we're definitely in the more enjoyable region that's about three times the performance but I personally was asking myself is this only in a synthetic test like the 3D Mark or can we see the same kind of difference like the same performance uplift in games and only have those very very tiny visual differences continuing with a plague tail Requiem that is a completely new title and it's not even publicly available yet so Nvidia thank you very much for making this possible that during an experience of a new card we can at the same time even test a game that's not even public yet the plague in-game scene basically confirmed our findings of a 3D Mark without dlss 3 in our native rendered scene we were seeing about 74 FPS on average with dlss 3 set to Quality we could observe about 145 FPS which is already twice the performance switching to dlss 3 Performance this further increased to 195 FPS theoretically you could improve this further by setting this to ultra performance which then allows to get 205 FPS however this is only recommended for 8K monitors because this is further degrading the image quality the performance increase which we could observe by running the LSS was 262 percent and interestingly at the same time the power consumption decreased by six percent looking at our image comparisons scene again I found it extremely difficult to find differences within the settings at least if we judge between the LSS quality and performance it's almost impossible to me to spot any kind of differences however disabling dlss you can definitely see differences if you pay attention to the trees in the background you will see that they are a bit darker and it seems like they're a bit denser than with dlss the native image also seems to be a little bit more smooth getting closer to the water it seems to be a bit easier to find some differences if you pay attention to the area which is more further out in the back where you can see the stones laying in the water you can see some kind of weird Reflections that also somehow look like artifacts I'm not quite sure if that is a feature if it's meant to be like that but you can see that dlss is definitely increasing this effect to me at least it seems like those are artifacts which are increased by the LSS Justice is another game that was directly provided by Nvidia media Nvidia also included a benchmark into the game which does not really reflect the gameplay of justice but it shows what's technically possible and also visually possible before we get to the image comparison we will first look at some numbers and if you check out the Benchmark data here you can see that this is kind of like a dlss study because even if you run a 4090 without the LSS this is nowhere near an area that is kind of playable or enjoyable a 3080 TI will get you 5 FPS on average so that is really interesting on the other hand though if you run this with the LSS active this is really nice this is visually very very interesting and as before we kept track of the power consumption during The Benchmark with dlss we saw 320 to 390 Watt on average 371. without dlss this is again increasing and we on average saw 410 watt with the Benchmark included in just this Nvidia showcases what kind of potential you can expect from the LSS 3 at least if your game supports it without dlss this would be absolutely unplayable and with performance this is absolutely smooth compared to the gameplay from plague I also find it a bit easier to spot differences if you pay attention to the woodwork on the side you can see without the LSS this is a little bit smoother and has a little bit more glow to it with the dlss it seems to lose all those Reflections if we switch over to this water scene you can see some tinier waves in the back with dlss it seems to be more waves and a little bit sharper waves and without dlss some of them seem to be disappearing the last game we're going to look at is cyberpunk first of all without dlss and RTX 4090 will perform about twice as good as the RTX 30 generation if we now add in the power consumption you will see compared to a 3080 TI okay the power consumption increased by 46 percent that is significant but what is more significant is the performance increase by 86 percent if we then also switch the LSS on it is just insane the 4090 with the LSS active delivers 139 FPS on average that is an increase by about 300 percent and now I had a very interesting finding if we look at the power consumption during cyberpunk and our Benchmark with dlss active or not active you will see the 490 will have 21 less power draw if dlss is active I think the reason for this is because the LSS performance will only render in 1080P which seems to be a little bit lighter for the 490 in our Benchmark scene you can see 320 to 340 watts with the LSS and without dlss it's 420 watt so about 100 watt more if the LSS is not active similar to the other games tested I find it extremely difficult to spot visual differences between the settings we had and I can tell you even if I pause it it is almost impossible for me to spot any kind of difference it might also make sense that you just take your time and replay and replay the footage which we took from the games and then you can let me know if you spotted some differences even though we already talked about the power consumption briefly during the benchmarks we showed some numbers with wire view I want to get to this topic a bit more in detail especially the efficiency that's why we will go right back to the start with 3D Mark Times by extreme if we perform a normal 3D Mark Times by extreme run without changing anything on their card we will get about 123 FPS in the first graphic test at the same time the power consumption is at about 420 watt the RDX 4090 Founders Edition is clocking with this setting at about 2750 megahertz in the next step I started decreasing the power Target in steps of 10 percent this means I was using the Asus GPU tweak 3 software and I set the power Target to 90 and tested again interestingly the clock did almost not change it decreased by about 20 megahertz while the power consumption decreased by 10 percent also the graphic score was almost the same I then decided to repeat all the testing from 10 to 130 power Target and the results are extremely interesting in this chart you will see the result of 3D Mark time space stream the FPS in red the blue line is showing the power consumption of the 49d again at 100 we see 123 FPS with 422 watt power consumption if we move over to the area on the left which is between 60 and 80 power Target we can see a lot less power consumption which is between 280 and 380 watt with almost The Identical performance if we now draw an FPS per watt curve we can see a Peak at 50 power Target and that is the most efficient point of the 4090 with about 0.42 FPS per watt as comparison a 3090 TI will have about 0.15 using a power Target of over 50 thus means that we will get more performance but at the same time with the bad relation a lot more power draw so going back to the other chart and now we will pay more attention to the area of 60 power Target compared to the 50 power Target the power draw is slightly more increased but at the same time the performance is still very good at this area my 4090 is still constantly clocking at about 2400 megahertz in result in Times by extreme we will lose about 10 percent in performance but at the same time we will decrease the power consumption by about one-third this means 33 percent less power draw and I also want to point out that because Times by extreme is a synthetic Benchmark this will react much more on Lower clocks than games to further evaluate this we will look at two games we will start with pubg simply because this was a high FPS title which causes high load on the 1490 and with 60 power Target we could decrease the power consumption by 33 percent while at the same time we only lost five percent of performance So subjectively speaking you will not even notice this and as a second comparison we will look at cyberpunk with active dlss in this Benchmark the power consumption was decreased by 20 while the performance was decreased only by two percent which is almost measurement tolerance after that I also tried to improve this further by using the VF curve editor which is included in the MSI afterburner unfortunately no matter what I tried with like the manual underworld thing the performance was always worse than just plainly limiting the power Target at this point when I was looking at the efficiency curve I was wondering like who came up with the idea to make the 4090 the way it is on the table right here because if you just look at this from a very objective point of view you can get about five percent less performance with about 130 to 150 watt less power draw 130 to 150 watt less power draw means a much Slimmer cooler it means avoiding all the drama around the power connector so many things that just don't make any kind of sense because the 49er on this table here performs about 40 to 80 percent better than the previous cards you could also get 35 to 75 percent more performance everybody would still be completely flashed by the performance and you could get a card with 300 watt TDP instead of 450 watt TDP Nvidia who came up with this decision it just it literally makes no sense we are in a region that you would typically access with overclocking that is what you would do you get like your extra three four five percent and you have to pay for it with 200 watt more power consumption typically that's what you also had with the 30th gen but this way I don't understand it there are two more things though I want to discuss about the founders Edition model even though we still talked about the card in our unboxing video there are two things I want to highlight it seems like the front fan on my phone's Edition is running a little bit out of round I'm not quite sure why that's the case if something went wrong during assembly or Manufacturing but it doesn't look right however I could not find any kind of influence like negative impact on the cooling performance or also on the noise level also this would not cause any vibrations to the card so it's just a visual thing but on the other hand the other fan in the back seems to have a problem on the bearing at least that's what I would assume because if you set this card to 45 fan speed or above it's putting out a very strange noise and I'm not quite sure how to describe that noise but you can just listen to it yourself the funny thing though is that I only noticed this right at the end of my testing simply because the card is running pretty cold and the fans are running at a very low fan speed pretty much all the time that they only noticed this after adjusting the fan curve manually at the end of my testing when I set this to like 80 for some testing that I noticed something sounds a bit odd but apart from that for the normal gaming this is a pretty quiet card and it's also a pretty cold card the GPU was too bigly at around like 63 64 degrees Celsius for the GPU temperature and the hotspot just above 70 degrees Celsius but that is in a perfect region it's almost time for the conclusion there is one more thing I want to say about Nvidia and especially because recently they had to earn a lot of criticism especially around the EVGA topic but at least for me for the 4090 review how everything was organized like getting a card the keynote the presentation the review guide getting all the soft for the organization the communication with Nvidia like even on a Sunday morning like 8 A.M I wrote a message to my Nvidia contact and he replied within like two minutes and that is something where I have to give hats off to Nvidia and especially my contact Jan thank you very much for your help during testing phase of the 4090. in my opinion the 4090 is a legendary card with legendary bad timing that's not India's fault though but just looking at what's going on on our planet we have a card in front of us that is very expensive with a very high powered draw in a situation where at least people here in Germany are fighting over like Energy prices and everything so that's a bit unfortunate for NVIDIA probably just talking about performance though I think just in history of gpus we have never seen such a jump before especially over two generations because the RTX 30 was already a huge jump in performance and then the 40 again even if you go back to like g46 to g47 or GeForce 8 to the 8800 GTX those were huge jumps but the RTX 4090 is even more impressive with the 4090 we saw a sick performance increase we also saw a sick increase of cooler design and even though I would definitely question whoever came up running the 4090 at 450 watt TDP instead of like 300 watt I'm still quite happy with the outcome of the cooler design because me personally and I will definitely get a 490 I will run this at like 70 power Target I will have much less power draw but at the same time you can make use of these huge coolers which will lead to much better temperatures and great noise levels that's what we're going to get for the 490 but again whoever came up and at Nvidia to run this at 450 watt it just it just makes no sense DLS S3 is a very impressive technology and I find it mind-blowing how much more performance you can generate with almost no visual loss but then again you should probably not take this as an argument to buy your 4090 because if I just look at the titles which were provided to us or like benchmarks that were provided to us for testing from Nvidia none of this is public for example a plague tail Requiem if I just launch the game from Steam the DLS S3 option is not present and you never know when will these Technologies make it to the market it kind of feels like with the first RTX cards RTX on like Ray tracing was heavily promoted but only a few titles were available at the market back then and it takes months and years for this technology to mature and to be available for a lot of games so just justifying this to buy a 490 probably doesn't really make a lot of sense then again the performance of the 4090 is just insane so that will be your argument to get one probably also insane price insane power consumption which doesn't make sense yeah we still have a lot of other stuff we will probably add this to a second video because I guess this will be too long we have some questions we asked to Nvidia for example but we will do a follow-up and there will be another video tomorrow with the 4090 from gigabytes so make sure to check back thanks for tuning in to the next time bye foreign

Channel: der8auer EN

Views: 165,019

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Id: 60yFji_GKak

Length: 25min 14sec (1514 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 11 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/Krelleth]

This is the one review everyone should watch, after your preferred YouTuber of choice, if it's not Roman already. The power targets for this card were set to an absurdly overkill value. You can drop it back as much as 33% (to 300W) and only lose 5% performance on many benchmarks.

It looks like nVidia has kind of shot themselves in the foot a bit, just like AMD did with the power targets for the 7950X. If they both had just settled for "only" 95% of the performance possible in their new silicon, all of the power and heating and cooling controversies go away, and we're just left with great new chips at functional, sustainable power usage... well, by high end standards, anyway.

[u/Nestledrink]

Wow. Derbauer's portion on the power limiting the card shows some insanely impressive power reduction while only losing 2-10% performance.

And this is just straight up power limit... apparently manual undervolting tuning yielded worse perf

[u/ja-ki]

Oh man I really really like the trend to power consumption awareness. Also great news the 4090 can be power limited THAT drastically. This will definitely work with my 750W PSU

[u/vaesauce]

Looks like I won't need to upgrade from my 850w PSU lol.

[u/Yinzone]

that video sealed the deal for me, droping the powertarget to 70% seems like the way to go.

[u/xxredees]

Does this mean that I don't have to upgrade my 750W psu?

[u/Quaxky]

My 750w power supply still crying in the corner

[u/another-redditor3]

since it looks like i can keep my 850w psu, this kinda seals the deal for me. guess im going to try and get a 4090 tomorrow morning.

[u/OvercompressedGoat]

So which body part are you guys gonna sell to afford this one?