NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 3090 Ti Throttled To 300 Watts Still Beats A Radeon RX 6900 XT
It's not a particularly surprising conclusion, for a few reasons. The power delivery system on the card is so overbuilt that it's sure to be the most efficient, and the extreme width of the GPU pipeline on the RTX 3090 Ti means that it can do more with each clock cycle. As clock rate (and the voltage required to sustain it) is one of the primary variables concerning a specific chip's power consumption, being able to do more work with less MHz means better performance, typically with less power.
After he got the card to cooperate, he tested it against itself with the stock power limit, as well as against other relevant GPUs: GeForce RTX 3090, RTX 3080 Ti, and RTX 3080 cards, as well as AMD's Radeon RX 6900 XT and RX 6800 XT models.
Igor's experiment shows that lopping off fully a third of the GeForce RTX 3090 Ti's power budget only reduces its performance by about 12%. "High-end CPUs and GPUs are essentially overclocked out of the box" isn't really a new revelation, but it's interesting to see just how far the RTX 3090 Ti is pushed above its optimal efficiency curve. The answer, it seems, is "quite far."
