Other companies do make products with lower power draw — Apple in particular has some good stuff in this space for people who need it for AI and not gaming. And even in the gaming space, you have many options for good products — but people who apparently have money to burn want the best at any cost.
So the point being, nvidia is optimizing for gamers who are willing to throw top dollar at the best gear, regardless of power draw. But it’s a choice, and other manufacturers can make different tradeoffs.
But yes, I do agree that TDPs for GPUs are getting ridiculous.
However, it's easy to get misled into thinking that 4k60 gaming is easily achieved by more mainstream hardware, because games these days are usually cheating by default using upscaling and frame interpolation to artificially inflate the reported resolution and frame rate without actually achieving the image quality that those numbers imply.
Gaming is still a class of workloads where the demand for more GPU performance is effectively unlimited, and there's no nearby threshold of "good enough" beyond which further quality improvements would be imperceptible to humans. It's not like audio where we've long since passed the limits of human perception.
x90 cards IMO are either bought by people that absolutely need them (yay market segmentation) or simply because they can (affording is another story) and want to have the best of the latest.
Cutting the 5090 down from 575w to 400w is a 10% perf decrease.
It's what Intel has been grappling with, their CPU's are drawing more and more wattage at the top end.
1. People want their desktop computers to be fast. These are not made to be portable battery sippers. Moar powa!!!
2. People have a powerpoint at the wall to plug their appliances into.
Ergo, desktop computers will tend towards 2000w+ devices.
"Insane!" you may cry. But a look at the history of car manufacture suggests that the market will dictate the trend. And in similar fashion, you will be able to buy your overpowered beast of a machine, and idle it to do what you need day to day.
Still? It runs Baldur's Gate 3. Not smoothly, but it's playable. I don't have an M4 Pro Max Ultra Plus around to compare the apples to apples, but I'd expect both perf and perf per watt to be even better.
If one trillion dollar company can manage this, why not the other?
But other people will look at that and say "Not smooth = unplayable. If you can do so much with 100w or less, then lets dial that up to 2000w and make my eyes bleed!"
We're not the ones pushing the limits of the market it seems.
Lack of electricity production is entirely a human choice at this point. There's no need to output carbon to make it happen.