One may suppose {that a} GPU that prices over $40,000 goes to be the most effective graphics card for gaming, however the reality is much more advanced than that. Actually, this Nvidia GPU can’t even sustain with built-in graphics options.
Now, earlier than you get too upset, you need to know I’m referring to Nvidia’s H100, which homes the GH100 chip (Grace Hopper). It’s a strong information heart GPU made to deal with high-performance computing (HPC) duties — not energy PC video games. It doesn’t have any show outputs, and regardless of its intensive capabilities, it additionally doesn’t have any coolers. It’s because, once more, you’d discover this GPU in an information heart or server setting, the place it’d be cooled with highly effective exterior followers.
Whereas it “solely” has 14,592 CUDA cores (which is fewer than the RTX 4090), it additionally has an insane quantity of VRAM and an enormous bus. In whole, the GPU sports activities 80GB of HBM2e reminiscence, break up into 5 HBM stacks, every linked to a 1024-bit bus. In contrast to Nvidia’s client GPUs, this card additionally nonetheless has NVLink, which implies it may be linked to work seamlessly in multi-GPU techniques.
The query stays: Why precisely is one of these GPU fairly so dangerous at normal utilization and video games?
To reveal the case, YouTuber Gamerwan was given 4 of those H100 graphics playing cards to check, and determined to place one in an everyday Home windows system to take a look at its efficiency. This was a PCIe 5.0 mannequin, and it needed to be paired with an RTX 4090 as a result of lack of show outputs. Gamerwan additionally 3D-printed a custom-designed exterior cooler to maintain the GPU operating easily.
It takes a bit of labor to even get the system to acknowledge the H100 as a correct GPU, however as soon as Gamerwan managed to beat the obstacles, he was additionally in a position to activate ray tracing help. Nevertheless, as we later discover all through the testing, there’s not a lot help for anything on a non-data heart platform.
In a regular 3DMark Time Spy take a look at, the GPU solely hit 2,681 factors. For comparability, the typical rating for the RTX 4090 is 30,353 factors. This rating places the H100 someplace between the buyer GTX 1050 and GTX 1060. Extra importantly, it’s nearly the identical as AMD’s Radeon 680M, which is an built-in GPU.
The gaming assessments additionally went poorly, with the graphics card hitting a median of 8 frames per second (fps) in Pink Useless Redemption 2. The dearth of software program help rears its ugly head right here — though the H100 can run at a most of 350 watts, the system can’t appear to push it previous 100W, leading to vastly throttled efficiency.
There are a number of totally different causes for this poor present of gaming powers. For one, althoughrthe H100 is an ultra-strong graphics card on paper, it’s a lot totally different on an architectural stage than the AD102 GPU that powers the RTX 4090. It solely has 24 raster working items (ROPs), which is a major downgrade from the 160 ROPs that the
Nvidia’s client GPUs obtain quite a lot of help on the software program facet with a purpose to run properly. This contains drivers, but in addition system help from builders — each in video games and in benchmark applications. There are not any drivers that optimize the efficiency of this GPU for gameplay, and the result’s, as you’ll be able to see, extraordinarily poor.
We’ve already seen the facility of drivers with Intel Arc, the place the {hardware} has remained the identical, however improved driver help delivered efficiency beneficial properties that made Arc an appropriate selection if you happen to’re shopping for a price range GPU. With no Nvidia Recreation Prepared drivers and an absence of entry to the remainder of Nvidia’s software program stack (together with the ever-impressive DLSS 3), the H100 is a $40,000 GPU that has no enterprise operating any kind of recreation.
In essence, it is a computing GPU, and never a graphics card in the identical method that almost all of us know them. It was made for every kind of HPC duties, with a robust give attention to AI workloads. Nvidia maintains a robust lead over AMD the place AI is worried, and playing cards just like the H100 play a giant half in that.
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