Nvidia's H100 Hopper Compute GPU Benchmarked in Games, Found Lacking

Nvidia
(Image credit: Nvidia)

Although compute GPUs like Nvidia's H100 formally belong to the category of graphics processing units, they can barely render graphics as they do not have enough special-purpose hardware. As it turns out Nvidia's H100, a card that costs over $30,000 performs worse than integrated GPUs in such benchmarks as 3DMark and Red Dead Redemption 2, as discovered by Geekerwan.

Nvidia's H100 card is based on the company's GH100 processor with 14,592 CUDA cores that support a variety of data formats used for AI and HPC workloads, including FP64, TF32, FP32, FP16, INT8, and FP8. By contrast, Nvidia's consumer GPUs, such as Nvidia's AD102, only properly support FP32. Meanwhile, GH100 only has 24 raster operating (ROPs) units and does not have display engines or display outputs. Furthermore, Nvidia does not optimize Hopper drivers for gaming applications. 

But running games on a card that costs over $30,000 does not make a lot of sense and Nvidia certainly did not design GH100 for rendering graphics. While Nvidia's GH100 has some graphics specific hardware inside, it is not made to offer any substantial performance in games, which is why it is slower than AMD's integrated Radeon 680M.

Although Nvidia's flagship compute GPU is not meant for graphics, it outperforms everything in datacenter AI and HPC applications and this is exactly what it is made for.

Anton Shilov
Contributing Writer

Anton Shilov is a contributing writer at Tom’s Hardware. Over the past couple of decades, he has covered everything from CPUs and GPUs to supercomputers and from modern process technologies and latest fab tools to high-tech industry trends.