Every new generation of GPU seems larger and more power-hungry than their predecessor. Is there any effort to produce faster GPUs that are smaller and use less power?
Every new GPU generation delivers more performance/W than the previous generation (mostly due to semiconductor process improvements) But the competition to have the fastest chip means that total power usage keeps growing.
Power efficient chips just doesn't generate headlines the same way.
And it doesn't help that game companies have little incentive to obsess over squeezing the absolute most performance out of the hardware when customers care more about "Jaw dropping visuals" and raytracing than knowing that the game can pull 60fps on 10 year old hardware.
We observe larger and more power hungry at the high end, because those models are selected for maximum performance - at the expense of everything else.
But GPU power efficiency (gflops/watt) has been increasing at an exponential pace as well - over the last decades it has been consistent doubling every 2-3 years. So over 10 years we have had 10-30x improvements in power efficiency. The same is true for cost efficiency (gflops/dollar).
