RX 5700 XT R3ed Devil query

Hello,

I have just gotten the Powercolor 5700 XT Red Devil from my son's PC ( I gave him my 3070 as he plays more FPS games than me ). He has always complained that it gets too hot and/or noisy. Both his case and my PC case have 6 x 120mm case fans.

I "tested" with Far Cry 5 New Dawn, 4K monitor.

1. 220W 65 FPS
2. 165W 60 FPS
3. 110W 53 FPS

These numbers are not constant everywhere but a good indication of overall performance. 110W is silent and 220W is loud. This card's fans are very noisy. Obviously there is a tremendous ask to expel 220W of heat compared to 110W of heat.

Anyway, what I cannot understand is how we have a 100% increase in power draw (from 110W to 220W) with relatively little FPS gain ( from 53 FPS to 65 FPS ).

Could someone please explain this? Have all GPUs the same steeply diminishing returns regarding power vs FPS ? Is this more of an AMD problem? How about the new GPUs, are the NVidia better/same as AMD in this respect?

 

Just means that the 5700XT isnt completely anemic at 110w, in fact it was discovered pretty early on that AMD put the ceiling a little high for general use so people were undervolting to reduce heat dump, dB's and more consistent clock speeds. As the performance difference between 325w and 150w really wasnt justifiable for 24/7 gaming (though I did it anyways)

5700XT isnt a high end card, its the mainstream offering. It just also happen to be true that AMD had nothing better to offer at the time

 

If you can find you get acceptable frame rates @ 110w, then that's the way to go. When I had an AMD 50th AE 5700xt, I immediately undervolted it to calm the blower fan down and used it for well over a year to play WoW @ 2560x1600 and it handled it just fine. It wasn't quiet but it wasn't running out of control like the Powercolor 5700xt I replaced.

At the time, 5700xt was AMD's high end offering on the market but the 5900xt (which begat the 6800xt) was on the table already. When all was said and done, it provides about 2070 Super performance.

Return on power requirements diminishes with just about every GPU especially as you're pushing the chip to its upper boundary.

 

If you're using a standard monitor/panel you would normally be capped at 4K/60FPS anyway. There's only a couple of panels out in the wild that do over 60hz but there are plenty of TV's that can do 120hz or higher. I would bet if you turned down the screen to 1080 or 1440 you would see more of a scale between 110W-220W in the FPS.

 

I have now received the 3070 I ordered on the 25th January (or thereabouts), and have taken the 5700XT out of the case. The 5700XT did love to pull 220W+ (without undervolts) but truth be told, it has a very nice control / monitoring application that lets you do voltages, frequencies and fans. And a fantastic power slider that lets you limit (or boost!) power draw and the card does everything else.

The point was that the difference between 55FPS and 60FPS is not really noticeable, but the card drew 50 extra watts for just those 5 FPS. Extreme case of law of diminishing returns.