Even though the most recent generation of graphics cards from AMD and Nvidia are some of the most power hungry ever, they won't hold on to that title for long. The next-generation Nvidia Lovelace cards are reportedly set to require anywhere from 450W to as much as 850W to power them, leading to a staggering power draw and thermal output demands, which will make next-generation high-end systems space heaters in all but name.
The Nvidia RTX 3090 has a power draw and TDP of 350W, demanding around 800W of PSU to operate with any real stability, and 1,000W+ units are even better. The upcoming RTX 3090 Ti is rumored to demand as much as 450W, making it likely the next contender for the big GPU crown, but Lovelace is going to make these cards seem tame, by comparison.
I am not clear at the moment whether one model has three TGP ranges or whether it has three models but the TGP number of the AD102 is 450W-650W-850W, of course this is not the final specification and there may be some deviation.
— Greymon55 (@greymon55) February 23, 2022
Whatever Nvidia appears to be doing with its next-gen cards, it isn't going to make them super efficient, at least by contemporary standards. New rumors suggest the cards will demand 450W, 650W, and 850W at different levels, though whether that's iterations on the top RTX 4090, or a measure of 4070, 4080, and 4090 TDPs, is still unknown.
The leakers involved with releasing these latest rumors make it clear that these aren't final specifications, and it may be that these super high TDPs are just giving Nvidia wiggle room during development of the new hardware, but it would be a continuation of a trend which hasn't slowed in recent years. New cards are demanding more power and more thermal dissipation, and it doesn't appear to have blunted demand, so maybe Nvidia is going all in with Lovelace.
What that would suggest, though, is that AMD's RDNA3 is going to be pretty impressive too. Nvidia wouldn't be giving its cards so much juice if it didn't have to.
