Gigabyte Teases Future-Gen GeForce RTX 8090 Ti And You're Going To Need A Bigger Case
Boy, that GeForce RTX 3090 sure is a gigantic graphics card. At least, that's what we all thought when it came out. Now, the GeForce RTX 4090 has hit the market and made the last-gen "BFGPU" look positively puny. High-end graphics cards are getting bigger, and have been for some time. Gigabyte's Aorus Twitter account decided to poke some fun at the trend with a wacky tweet, pictured below.
Embedded in the tweet was the image at the top of the page, which you can click to see in higher resolution. Jokes aside, it appears to be some kind of industrial cooler or ventilator, but the three large axial fans arranged in a line with their rectangular casing definitely gives the impression of a gigantic graphics card. Comically, it appears that it's being installed at or near a power station of some kind.
GPUs are getting bigger because their power requirements are going up. More power means more heat, and that means you need more mass to dissipate the energy. As for why graphics processors are pulling more power, it has to do with diminishing returns from foundry advancements. To keep the pace of performance increases steady as progress slows and die shrinks offer less and less benefit, it becomes necessary to make ever-larger GPUs that draw more and more power.
Aorus credits the meme idea to /u/AngryPotato8 on Reddit, although the image has been a popular (if low-effort) meme post on the PC Master Race subreddit for a while now. If you're feeling fatigued over thousand-dollar 350-watt-plus graphics cards, know that AMD and NVIDIA, having launched their halo products, will be focused on mid-range and high-end products for the foreseeable future. Hopefully we see some impressively-efficient GPUs in the first half of next year.
