Nvidia RTX Series

[majestic]

7 minutes ago, Sarex said:

Lucky bastard...

I can also pawn off the old card for a chunk of money, probably, a friend already said he'll probably take it off my hands, meaning the net cost is somewhere around 650€. While that is a technicality that I just came up with to "justify" spending still way too much on a card I don't really need, it's an okay price, and the 4070 TI comes with the advantage of not having to upgrade my PSU for it. It really is pretty efficient.

[majestic]

Curiously enough, the biggest hurdle to installing the RTX 4070 TI was not fiddling with the cables. The computer was built cleanly, all I had to do was to just plug a new cable in. Getting the RTX 3060 12GB out of the PCI-E slot on the other hand, that was a challenge. Good thing I have really long fingers, that chunky be quiet! Dark Rock Pro and some of Asus' heatsinks almost completely prevented me from reaching the unlock button for the latch in a way so I could apply enough pressure on it to unlock.

Card draws - with unaltered settings - 140W in Hogwarts Legacy on Ultra (1080p, with DLSS). 60° GPU, 65° hotspot with the fans silently spinning at 30%, 1100 RPM at 2760 MHz GPU clock. Idle power draw of the card is less than 8W, what with my (gaming) PC only having one monitor. Playing something less demanding keeps the card in idle mode and it has zero fan spinning.

Guess fiddling with the power target or voltages would yield even better results at barely any performance cost. Conclusion: Faster, less noise and pretty good power consumption. The card got a whole lot of hate for the MRSP, which I understand, and it could have a better memory interface (or rather, it could have come with 16GB memory, like the 4080), but for me and my aspirations to play games at 1080p, well, I'll be good for a while now.

[majestic]

On 4/1/2023 at 2:53 PM, majestic said:

Guess fiddling with the power target or voltages would yield even better results at barely any performance cost. Conclusion: Faster, less noise and pretty good power consumption.

Minor fiddling update: The card seems to be stable when undervolted to 0.975V (not surprising, as this seems to be the lowest commonly stable setting across all Ada Lovelace GPUs), at a 2790Mhz maximum core clock, limiting the drawn power at a full GPU load to ~200W. Full load temperatures are down by almost 10° on average. Regular gaming temperatures are mostly unchanged due to the fan curve settings, but the hotspot temperature is down 5° and the average power draw is down by some 20W while playing Hogwarts Legacy.

Edited April 21, 2023 by majestic

[majestic]

Binning and VBIOS shenanigans in the RTX 4070 MSRP models.

TL;DR: Some RTX 4070 MSRP cards with a decent enough cooling solution and a 215W power limit can easily reach the same clock speeds as the OC models with a 240W power limit. If anyone is in the market for a 4070, which currently appears to be no one on the planet (), it might pay off to go for a three fan MRSP model, as they can potentially reach stable 3GHz clock speeds within the 215W MSRP card power limit.

Not that it makes much of a difference, and the OC markup is really not worth it on these cards (arguably on any of them except for the 4090). Speaking of making a difference:

On 4/22/2023 at 1:54 AM, majestic said:

Minor fiddling update: The card seems to be stable when undervolted to 0.975V (not surprising, as this seems to be the lowest commonly stable setting across all Ada Lovelace GPUs), at a 2790Mhz maximum core clock, limiting the drawn power at a full GPU load to ~200W.

Clocked it "down" to the RTX 4070 TI's default boost clock and lowered the voltage some more, 2610Mhz @ 900mV. 3% loss of performance, but a silent GPU even under heavier loads.

Edited May 5, 2023 by majestic

[Keyrock]

One thing to note about overclocking GPUs that's sometimes overlooked. Overclocking the memory can often have as much, if not more, of an effect on game performance than overclocking the cores.

Edited May 5, 2023 by Keyrock

[ComradeYellow]

7 hours ago, Keyrock said:

One thing to note about overclocking GPUs that's sometimes overlooked. Overclocking the memory can often have as much, if not more, of an effect on game performance than overclocking the cores.

Jeez man even I knew that and I would hardly call myself a tech wizz! 

Got my 3070 ti laptop breaching that magic 12000 number that puts me at "Excellent Performance" on 'Timespy' with +220 Core and +395 Mem (Mhz)

Really can't wait for DX13 in any case, DX12 is just as underwhelming as DX10 was all those years ago.

[majestic]

Well, as nobody else posted it:

Yeah, do not buy Jensen another leather jacket. Sounds ridiculous coming from someone who bought an RTX 4070 TI, but that card was actually pretty okay deal for the price it was selling when I grabbed one. It is less so now that vendors are no longer trying to sell the 7900 XT for 4080 prices. 

Makes me sad because I originally wanted to get one of those for my nephew, but he's just going to have to tough it out with the RTX 3050 for the time being. Perhaps the RTX 4060 is going to be a decent deal, at least. Yeah, who am I kidding, right?

[Zoraptor]

One suspects that the 4060 will be an absolute steal.

Compared to the 4060Ti 16GB

[majestic]

Well, nVidia's Q1 earnings call sure was something. Certainly not what gamers were hoping for though.

[ComradeYellow]

https://convergetechmedia.com/nvidia-q1-2023-earnings-hit-8-29b-quarterly-revenue-record/

For context.

Not surprising, really.  To me anyway.  People aren't gonna stop buying Geforce unless AMD finds a way to seriously drop their Radeon prices.  There's probably more variables here than discreet GPU's, but I can't help but think it all ties in for equal proportion.

I know nobody here wants to here this but the only hope I see for for AMD is for them to be under the yoke of the Chinese government.  The Chinese are very skilled at subsidizing key competitive industries and could seriously help them drop prices on their high end GPU's.

[majestic]

TL;DR: The performance difference between a 3060 Ti and a 4060 Ti goes away completely if used with PCIE 3.0. Hilarious.

[Bartimaeus]

well, that's awkward for people with zen 2/3 boards with only pcie 3.0 who just want a "mid-end" GPU upgrade

i use this specific example because it's literally me

Edited May 28, 2023 by Bartimaeus

[Keyrock]

I'm looking forward to the future where there are consumer available 4K-capable APUs, iGPUs, whatever you want to call them, and I can be done with discrete GPUs altogether. I'll be quite happy if I never buy a discrete GPU ever again.

Edited May 28, 2023 by Keyrock

[majestic]

A while ago, at NVIDIA headquarter:

Random person in meeting: "Hey, people made fun weird keynote presentations recently, perhaps we should..."
Jensen: "Hold by beer!"

What the hell. 

[Bartimaeus]

Luckily, I just checked Gamer's Nexus earlier this morning, otherwise I wouldn't have the foggiest clue what you're talking about. Don't think most people should basically ever watch keynotes, we aren't usually the target audience anyways, so of course it's going to come across as total nonsense. It doesn't seem like this one was hardly gaming-focused at all.

Edited May 30, 2023 by Bartimaeus

[majestic]

Well, regardless of the impressive work, here's the rub: If you buy a prebuilt with a 4090, then... don't manhandle it during transport. Or have an actual shipping company deliver it to you. If they break something during shipping, they're responsible for the damage and have to pay for replacements, at least here in commie Yurop.  

Edit: With how large coolers have become, mounting on consumer grade hardware should be redesigned. The problem's not just with the 4090, although the enormous size makes it more susceptible to this type of damage. You can get broken PCBs or ripped pads on the larger AMD cards as well (the channel has a 6950 XT repair too), and on 30-series cards too.

Edited August 7, 2023 by majestic

[Bartimaeus]

updating my nvidia gpu driver caused my computer to kill itself

during the update, i lost all video output and nothing i could do would restore it (although I was able to confirm that my system was actually still running because I could start music with a hotkey press and hear the generic windows error sounds by just smashing buttons); tried to restart, tried to go into safe mode, but even on bootup during just the motherboard manufacturer logo, my screens were totally blank

had to put my system drive into another computer and delete my nvidia drivers from there in order to restore functionality of one of my monitors, because literally nothing else i did would work...i'm now sitting here wondering if i roll the dice by trying to install the latest driver again

is this the part where i vehemently swear off all nvidia products for the rest of my life? regardless, would not recommend the latest nvidia gpu driver, I'd give it a 4/10 at best, would really like to see a return to form for the inevitable sequels, but i'm not too optimstic about it at this point

Edited September 28, 2023 by Bartimaeus

[Sarex]

42 minutes ago, Bartimaeus said:

updating my nvidia gpu driver caused my computer to kill itself

during the update, i lost all video output and nothing i could do would restore it (although I was able to confirm that my system was actually still running because I could start music with a hotkey press and hear the generic windows error sounds by just smashing buttons); tried to restart, tried to go into safe mode, but even on bootup during just the motherboard manufacturer logo, my screens were totally blank

had to put my system drive into another computer and delete my nvidia drivers from there in order to restore functionality of one of my monitors, because literally nothing else i did would work...i'm now sitting here wondering if i roll the dice by trying to install the latest driver again

is this the part where i vehemently swear off all nvidia products for the rest of my life? regardless, would not recommend the latest nvidia gpu driver, I'd give it a 4/10 at best, would really like to see a return to form for the inevitable sequels, but i'm not too optimstic about it at this point

Use DDU when installing drivers. I got in to that habit very early on.

[majestic]

17 hours ago, Bartimaeus said:

is this the part where i vehemently swear off all nvidia products for the rest of my life?

Look on the bright side, if a freak accident during installation happens with AMD's drivers, it's completely bricking Windows, not just messing up the display output.

Like I said, time to get an Intel GPU.

Edit: Needless to say, if that issue keeps happening on several computers someone in your immediate family decided you're responsible for, then be my guest and swear off nVidia for the rest of your life.

Edited September 29, 2023 by majestic

[majestic]

https://www.igorslab.de/en/smoldering-headers-on-nvidias-geforce-rtx-4090/

TL;DR: Not every burning RTX 4090 was necessarily user error.

The PCI SIG specs for the 12VHWPR headers and plugs were (and still are) so unclear and incomplete that production tolerances alone are enough to potentially fry them under heavy load, i.e. anything above 400W power draw, before factoring in manufacturing cost reduction by making them as cheap as possible, next to a few potential issues caused by AIB's placement of the headers, i.e. some RTX 4090s are potentially more prone to burned headers than others.

[Sarex]

Now it all makes sense.

[Keyrock]

As expected, Nvidia has launched the RTX 4090D. The "D" stands for <insert your own joke about Nvidia dicking people over>. This is essentially a slightly cut down 4090 and the best part is that it has the exact same MSRP. Less card for the same money, that's just Jensen being Jensen. In fairness, this card isn't meant for most of us, it's meant to be sold in China to bypass the restrictions imposed on selling chips to them. Still, typical Nvidia ***hole move to sell a gimped version of a card for the same price, plus I guarantee they will try to sucker people outside of China into buying it too.

Edited December 28, 2023 by Keyrock

[majestic]

I suppose no one talking about the Super launch is really symptomatic of it being not very exciting. Granted, the 4080 Super was never going to be that interesting outside of the price drop, but the 4070 Ti Super was a little disappointing. Looks like the card's additional memory and cores don't gel too much with the power limit of the original 4070 Ti. It would probably do a bit better if you can get one that undervolts well.

Power limits in nVidia cards are a bit different as far as I know, as the cards don't necessarily clock lower when power limited, but can also turn off cores. Quite possible that the additional cores of the 4070 Ti Super can't be used fully under heavy loads. Seems a tad strange that 10% more cores only yield a 5% improvement, considering how close the cut down AD103 die is to the original 4080... huh.

[Humanoid]

Yeah, for Americans for which the Super is a price drop it's just boring. But for the rest of the world, it doesn't even have that to fall back on. A quick look locally show the 4080S at $1800, the 4080 at $1600. Yeah, it's less than pointless, buyers who come in after the old stock dries up will potentially end up worse off overall in terms of frames per dollar.

It's not even a matter of local stores price gouging on the shiny new release, nVidia formally set the MSRP to $1870. The refresh serves to interrupt the natural price drops of the old card and is in effect a price hike to prop up margins between now and the release of the next gen.

 

To be fair, I'm not currently following the market in any meaningful way. When in this mode I only read the conclusion page or watch the last 5 minutes of a couple reviews and don't care to dig any deeper. I built my current system in early 2021 and yet three years it feels like only yesterday. 20 years ago, that kind of time period would have had seen me upgrade at least once, if not twice. I'm probably golden until something like The Witcher 4 releases in what, 2026-27 at the earliest?

[majestic]

12 hours ago, Humanoid said:

Yeah, for Americans for which the Super is a price drop it's just boring. But for the rest of the world, it doesn't even have that to fall back on. A quick look locally show the 4080S at $1800, the 4080 at $1600. Yeah, it's less than pointless, buyers who come in after the old stock dries up will potentially end up worse off overall in terms of frames per dollar.

Local pricing being strange is one of the reasons why I have an RTX 4070 TI. While it is a Zotac MSRP model, it cost me 850€, which is 40€ less than nVidia's offical MSRP for Europe, and at the time vendors wanted 1300€ for a 7900 XT (non-second X!), with the RTX 4080 being cheaper.

I mean, yeah, not that I would have gotten the 7900 XT either way, but I probably would not have bought a 4070 Ti if it wasn't severly below MSRP like that. Edit: The 4070 Ti was also cheaper than all the 30 generation cards above a 3070 Ti to boot. I had to laugh quite a bit when it was - rightfully, I guess, if you live in the US - critized for being bad value, when it was pretty good value for a couple of months in Central Europe. Well, compared to other equally fast or even slower options. The price is still way out there, but the prices are probably here to stay.

Edited February 1 by majestic
Eh, math hard...