Edward Crisler, PR manager at Sapphire Technology, wishes his company had more freedom in design. In a recent podcast with Hardware Unboxed discussing Sapphire graphics cards and the GPU market, the PR manager and PC enthusiast said that he wished AIB partners like Sapphire would be free to make their own graphics cards without limitations applied by chip makers like AMD and Nvidia.
In the GPU market where nearly all graphics card models perform the same across all AIB partners that make them. “I personally wish they would let us be the companies that we are, instead of trying to create the mold,” he said.
How The DRAM Crisis Will Affect Gaming GPUs (feat. Ed from Sapphire) – YouTube
AIB partners have to follow strict guidelines when developing a graphics card. The main restrictions Nvidia and AMD put on their partners revolve around overclocking, power delivery, and memory.
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AIB partners can’t unlock additional voltage points to enable higher overclocking potential, and AIB partners can’t add extra VRAM to make higher or lower capacity models, unless the GPU model in question officially supports it (such as the RX 9060 XT 8GB and RX 9060 XT 16GB, for example). Power limits can also be artificially restricted, preventing partners from going beyond a certain wattage envelope depending on the model. These limits are the main cause behind the performance linearity behind all modern GPUs, and how the cheapest RTX 5070, for instance, performs virtually the same as the most expensive version out of the box.