I Think We Were Right about NVIDIA

Last week, we covered NVIDIA's RTX 5000 series with the little information we had about it. In that article, we approached NVIDIA from the lens of a skeptic scrutinizing the company's focus on AI rather architectural innovation. It's an interesting article that you can check out here.

Just to put you in the picture, NVIDIA's 4000 series launched around two years ago in 2022; additionally, the 3000 series released four years ago in 2020. These time periods are important because they indicate generational advancement every two years. When we say generational advancement, we are talking about something worth an upgrade—something worth the money.

Our Fears Come True

Put simply, between the 4090 and the 3090 is at least a 65% performance boost in the most basic benchmark: gaming. Now, let's compare the 5090 to the 4090.

Barely, just barely about a 30% improvement. Bear in mind, we chose the 5090 on purpose, as this is the best it's going to get. The lower you go down the series, the lower the improvement percentages become, reaching even single digits. One might say, "Well, 30% is still decent and besides, technology does reach flatline eventually." Yes, we would also give NVIDIA the benefit of the doubt if they at least did power consumption right. If we got a more efficient card with overall lower power consumption and a 30% increase in performance, we would say that this is worth our time and money. However, this is also not the case.

The 4090 was an absolute monster, as it not only buried the 3000 series in terms of performance but also in power draw. In some cases, it even drew less power than its counterpart! Remember, this is a card that is at the very least 65% faster than its predecessor.

Comparing this to the 5090 vs. 4090, it quickly becomes clear where things are going wrong. The 5090 consumes significantly more power but only delivers a 30% performance increase. If we put the average performance gains and the average power draw increase into a ratio, it begins to become clear why upgrading from a 4090 would be comparable to flushing money down the toilet.

What GPUs Were

Until today, a generation of new GPUs always meant revolutionary architectural changes and power draw efficiency. With the 5000 series, NVIDIA simply shrugged off hardware-based innovation and instead mentions AI like 114 times in one keynote.

NVIDIA has simply become overly anti-consumer, and as long as corporate giants like Microsoft and OpenAI are willing to throw billions at NVIDIA, no one can really stop them.