The $40,000 NVIDIA H100 is Slower Than the Radeon 680M in Gaming
Most of us are probably aware of NVIDIA’s $40,000 monstrosity, the Hopper-based H100. This GPU packs quite the punch when it comes to AI acceleration and data-center-oriented workloads. However, it lacks severely in one aspect and that is gaming. Believe it or not, it actually loses to AMD’s integrated Radeon 680M iGPU, however, that was ‘kind of’ expected. Let’s go over the H100’s performance.
The Hopper H100 PCIe
The H100 arrives in various form factors, one of them being the PCIe version. YouTuber Geekerwan got his hands on a PCIe variant of the H100 and decided to give it a go in gaming. The H100 is the data center analogous of NVIDIA’s kingpin RTX 4090. The H100 (PCIe) boasts a total of 14592 CUDA cores, just shy of its Ada Lovelace counterpart.
Alongside the shader count, we see 80GB of HBM2e memory, probably enough to run The Last of Us. And remember, this chip is a chonker, coming in at 814 mm², whilst packing 80 Billion transistors. It does consume 350W of power, but that’s small in contrast to the RTX 4090.
Making Windows recognize the H100 as a GPU was, not an easy task. An external GPU was used for the purpose of display output. After a lot of wizardry, the GPU was finally able to be tested. But don’t get your hopes up, for this is not exactly a gaming GPU.
Performance
Under stress, the H100 draws roughly 90W of power, which is a measly 25% of its total TDP. The temperature also remains at a calm 46.1*C. Most importantly, 100% of the GPU is being used for this test, so this isn’t an optimization problem at the software level.
In Time Spy, the H100 manages to attain 2681 points, falling short of the Radeon 680M. Keeping things short, this GPU is slower than modern-day integrated GPUs, however, only in gaming. To be fair, the H100’s performance really shines in data-centers where it crushes its predecessor and competitors.
How about some real gaming tests? In Red Dead Redemption 2, the H100 barely manages to go past the 10 FPS threshold. Talk about a cinematic experience. While most gamers would be happy at 30 FPS, they would probably need to redefine their definition of a playable experience if they want to game with an H100.
Summary
All in all, the H100 is absolutely not meant for gaming, and neither was it designed to be used for gaming. It is an absolute behemoth in its own department. And no, this is not a software-level issue, where good-enough drivers would make the H100’s performance on par with the RTX 4090.
The H100 has an ROP count of 24, lower than an RTX 3050 (32) and much lower than the RTX 4090 (176). Moreover, its pixel fillrate stands at 42.12 GPixel/s, crushed by the 4090’s 443.5 GPixel/s (10x more). So yes, this is absolutely a hardware-level limitation that can not be optimized by any software-level witchcraft.
