$30,000 Nvidia H100 Hopper GPU tested in games: Results are surprising

If you didn’t know, AI and high-performance computing is a huge business. This is the reason why Nvidia has reached a market value of over a trillion dollars. Behind this is the explosion of demand for the company’s enterprise products, including the powerful H100 Hopper GPU. And yes, this giant processor, which can cost $30,000 or more, shares most of its DNA with the humble GeForce gaming graphics cards. But how is the gaming performance of this monster card?

$30,000 Nvidia H100 Hopper gaming performance

As a fun experiment, YouTuber Geekerwan used one of these monster cards in several game benchmarks. The results were surprising for those unfamiliar with this area, but actually expected for those familiar with it. The H100 that Geekerwan used was the PCIe version of the card. This model has 80GB of HBM2e memory, 14,592 CUDA cores. For comparison: The RTX 4090 has 24Gb of GDDR6X memory and 16,384 CUDA cores. On paper, the H100 shouldn’t be too bad, right?

It’s actually very weak in games, the card can only produce 2,681 3DMark Time Spy graphics score. So this result is lower than Radeon 680M integrated graphics card. So much so that in Red Dead Redemption 2, the card could barely reach 30 FPS at 1080p. For this, let’s mention that DLSS is also activated.

However, these results are not surprising. While the H100 is an extremely powerful card, it wasn’t designed for graphics applications. It also lacks some other hard hardware that is critical for gaming. For example, there is no display output on the card, a secondary card is used for video output. In addition, there is the fact that the driver is not fully optimized for gaming. During gaming tests, the GPU’s power consumption was under 100W, which indicates a huge lack of usage.