Question about the new amd Polaris cards

[Butosai]

Why are they putting such a big emphasis on power consumption? Who cares how much power a gpu takes? I must be missing something here because the nvidia cards are boasting about performance increase and amd is boasting about power consumption. What am I missing here?

[Lathais]

Why are they putting such a big emphasis on power consumption? Who cares how much power a gpu takes? I must be missing something here because the nvidia cards are boasting about performance increase and amd is boasting about power consumption. What am I missing here?

Because typically, in the past, when you had nVidia card and an AMD card that performed roughly the same the AMD card used far more power and therefore generates much more heat. Especially with the 9xx series nVidia got power requirements down really really low and made a big deal of it. AMD has now done the same, reduced power usage.

[Chickat]

Plus I only have a 500w psu and plan to upgrade. The lower the better.

[mrgreenthump]

Why are they putting such a big emphasis on power consumption? Who cares how much power a gpu takes? I must be missing something here because the nvidia cards are boasting about performance increase and amd is boasting about power consumption. What am I missing here?

Laptops, tablets, easier to run Crossfire, silent computing, warm climates without AC etc etc.

Also it's just logical for Nvidia to state performance increase, because their cards are currently behind AMD and AMD to boast performance per watt as they are behind Nvidia in that regard. In any case it's marketing talk, we can only speculate for now as we have no real world benchmarks yet.

[Butler to Baby Sloths]

Why are they putting such a big emphasis on power consumption? Who cares how much power a gpu takes? I must be missing something here because the nvidia cards are boasting about performance increase and amd is boasting about power consumption. What am I missing here?

Because nVidia has spent the last two years making "low power consumption" the "thing to have" (even if their cards aren't particularly power efficient when they are under load ).

[Remilia]

It wasn't a big deal until Maxwell quite honestly. Wasn't a big deal during Fermi but hey, whatever floats the public opinion's boat. Only place it matters the most is laptops.

[Artorius]

It's a performance/watt thing not only power consumption.

And this is the kind of thing that consumers are interested it for some reason, Plasma TVs always had better picture quality and they died, one of the reasons was that they consumed more power...

[Kagthul]

It wasn't a big deal until Maxwell quite honestly. Wasn't a big deal during Fermi but hey, whatever floats the public opinion's boat. Only place it matters the most is laptops.

Eh, the less power drawn, the less heat produced, which has typically been the limiting factor in squeezing performance out of GPUs.

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Plus I only have a 500w psu and plan to upgrade. The lower the better.

Unless you're planning on SLI/Xfire, 500 is plenty. You can run a Titan X or Fury on 500w.

[Chickat]

Eh, the less power drawn, the less heat produced, which has typically been the limiting factor in squeezing performance out of GPUs.

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Unless you're planning on SLI/Xfire, 500 is plenty. You can run a Titan X or Fury on 500w.

Idk, the card I have now recommends a 500w on their website, and some sites recommend 550w for it. Thats why im weary to upgrade my ram to 16gb with my specs in my sig.

[Remilia]

Eh, the less power drawn, the less heat produced, which has typically been the limiting factor in squeezing performance out of GPUs.

In a way I suppose. It mostly pertains to overclocking and even then each chip has a limit despite what voltage and temperature you can reasonably get it.

Idk, the card I have now recommends a 500w on their website, and some sites recommend 550w for it. Thats why im weary to upgrade my ram to 16gb with my specs in my sig.

RAM barely takes any power. Talking about like 3W maybe for a computer for another 8GB
380x takes about 180W at peak gaming loads.
Manufacturers tend to over estimate the needed amount so they A. Cover their ass. B. Cause there are terrible PSUs out there that don't deliver their advertised wattage.

[Deleted]

Because typically, in the past, when you had nVidia card and an AMD card that performed roughly the same the AMD card used far more power and therefore generates much more heat. Especially with the 9xx series nVidia got power requirements down really really low and made a big deal of it. AMD has now done the same, reduced power usage.

Hmmm... The past would probably show that Nvidia used to have a higher power requirement (4xx, 5xx), only since Maxwell did this really change. It possibly started with the 680 vs 7970. Because the 680 had no computing power compared to the 7970.

And since Maxwell, just about everyone is falling over power consumption, or it has become a bigger deal than it was befor maxwell. That's Nvidia marketing working wonders...

[SodiumChloride]

Well, it will help with fan noise too ...