... but at the same time, it wasn't designed for that purpose at all!
Well-known for its GeForce graphics cards, NVIDIA doesn't just design GPUs for gamers. In fact, an ever-growing proportion of its business today concerns high-performance computing solutions, particularly for artificial intelligence. It is with this in mind that many NVIDIA calculators have been developed, such as the Hopper GH100, which powers the H100 board. Such a board is available on the Chinese market for the "modest" sum of 300,000 renminbi (or yuan), or just over 38,000 euros. A price that didn't scare off Chinese YouTuber Geekerwana. In fact, knowing that he probably didn't pay for it, he was rather encouraged and even got his hands on four such cards with a single objective in mind: to find out what a card of this price could do against our favorite video games.
The video published for the occasion is interesting in more ways than one, even if it is unfortunately only available in Chinese. It shows Geekerwana installing the cards and details of the GPU, which is equipped with 14,592 CUDA cores and no less than 80 GB of HBM3 video memory. The interface of this video memory is 5,120-bit, giving a bandwidth of 2Tb/s, compared with "only" 1Tb/s for the very powerful GeForce RTX 4090. Incidentally, the H100 is one of the very first NVIDIA solutions to exploit PCI Express Gen 5, which is not yet standard in the GeForce universe. Geekerwana points out that the H100 is a particularly compact card insofar as no active cooling solution is really associated with it: designed to be integrated into a rack case, it relies on the latter to ensure air circulation.
Videocardz
However, Geekerwana didn't encounter any particular problems when it came to tinkering with its own system... at least, not when it came to cooling the beast. In fact, when it came to performance measurements, things were less pleasing. For example, on the 3DMark TimeSpy scene, the H100 produced just 2,681 points, i.e. less than a Radeon 680M-based solution (2,710 points). Worse still, on the game Red Dead Redemption 2, it's absolutely impossible to enjoy yourself: the animation is nothing more than a slideshow running at an average of 8 frames per second! To explain these disappointments, Videocardz puts forward several points. Firstly, the low number of ROP units (dedicated to rendering) acts as a dramatic brake compared to what a GeForce card can produce. What's more, only 4 of the 112 texturing units are actually usable and, to make matters worse, no graphics driver optimized for video games has been released by NVIDIA for this card. We suspected that, designed for intensive computing, an H100 card wouldn't be at home on our video games: now we know just how uncomfortable!
Videocardz
