AMD Radeon RX 7000 Graphics Cards With RDNA 3 GPUs Confirmed To Feature Higher Power Consumption

In an interview with Tomshardware, AMD's Senior Vice President, Sam Naffziger, has hinted that the next-gen RDNA 3 GPUs powering the Radeon RX 7000 series graphics cards will feature higher power consumption than existing solutions while still delivering 50% perf/watt gains.

Both AMD and NVIDIA are expected to heavily focus on efficiency and GPU power design of their next-gen GPUs to deliver higher performance. We have seen various leaks for NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 40 series graphics cards which are expected to rock up to 600W designs. Meanwhile, AMD is saying that while they announced a more than 50% performance per watt uplift over the previous generation, that doesn't mean that power levels aren't going to go up for RDNA 3 'Radeon RX 7000' series graphics cards.

“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."

If you remember, a few months back, we had seen rumors of the AMD RDNA 3-powered Radeon RX 7000 series offering TDPs of up to 400W. That's a 100W increase over the existing Navi 21 GPU that goes up to 335W (Navi 21 KXTX). So if AMD is to achieve a 2x performance gain over its existing chip lineup, the TDP should end up close to 450W which is the same as the one rumored for the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 BFGPU. At the same time, the peak power and operational power may vary a lot and Sam is pretty confident when he says that the competition will have to push the power higher (a lot higher) than they will.

Furthermore, next-gen graphics cards with over 400-450W TBP will have to utilize the brand new PCIe Gen 5 connectors considering triple 8-pin connectors can only go as far as up to 450W & no company has made that design choice for their reference cards at least (yet). So whether AMD is looking to go the triple 8-pin route or gonna end up with the new PCIe Gen 5 connector that will conform to the ATX 3.0 standard and deliver stable performance, remains to be seen from the AMD camp.

Some of the key features of the RDNA 3 GPUs highlighted by AMD will include:

The AMD Radeon RX 7000 series graphics cards based on the RDNA 3 GPU architecture are expected to launch later this year so expect more information in the coming months.

News Source: Videocardz