Reducing Energy Costs - Graphics and System Related

[mid_gen]

Your workplace doesn't give you a laptop or nuc to connect to a server or something with high performance remote computing?

Game dev....remote has its drawbacks.

 

[LaurenceGough]

There is a lot of power savings to be had on Nvidia cards if the game prefers to use cores over clocks. I play a lot of games with rtss overlay and I've noticed that some games will only use some of the cores but run them at full clocks and some games will use all the gpu cores it can get and is happy to run those clocks at low speed if the performance is meeting your frame cap

Why this behaviour is important is because Nvidia GPU power draw is massively affected by the clock speed but has an incredibly tiny amount of impact from using lots of cores. So if you can find a sweet spot in a game where you are using all your cores but at low clocks you can save big time - I've encountered games that make my 3090 use 200watts to get 60fps and then 420watts to get 70fps, the difference can be that massive and in this particular example the game was running all cores in use but only at 1600mhz for 60fps and at 70fps it went up to 2050mhz.


But it's not possible in all games, I've played games that I can cap at 60fps, where it would do 200fps uncapped and yet at the 60fps my 3090 is still using 420watts - what happens here is that the game only uses like 20 to 40% of the cores but tells the gpu to run all the cores at max clock speed and as I mentioned before on Nvidia GPU clock speed affects power draw and not the number of cores used.


So because this behaviour can seem random and game specific, the easiest way to save power on Nvidia GPU is then in fact to simply lower the maximum clock speed and reduce the voltage curve - just introducing a 60fps frame cap doesn't work in all games

Interesting, is this same behaviour seem on AMD cards or is it platform agnostic?

I am quite interested in GPU power savings myself hence why I'd never go for a high end GPU unless it was lower wattage. It can add up a lot over the year and helps save the planet a little bit I guess... Granted some people worry about other things.

 

[Uriel]

Lots of low power cores may be the way forwards for GPUs in terms of efficiency. The Quadro RTX A2000 is supposed to be bus powered (so I believe less than 75w) but have similar gaming performance to an RTX 3050. It's considerably lower clocked.

 

[Tired9]

I will always sit back with a controller when I can and enable Vsync, it's not all that often I fire up a game that will eat my 170hz display like COD WZ etc with Vsync off.

When I enable Vsync I also enable the FPS cap in the driver.

Plus you can't buy a sexy controller like this and not use it..

 

[gtl_racer]

CPU - 5600X - I run undervolted to 1.1V, 4200MHz allcore, but am going Eco mode soon..

GPU - 6900XT - I currently run underclocked to 1500MHz + lower SoC voltage(1000mV max) & lower min. GFX voltage(750mV) & lower memory voltage(800/1300mV VDDCI/MVDD) in MPT. Power consumption in game(WWZ) is 110W, fps in 3k is 150+. More aggressive undervolt can be applied for mining, resulting in 110W consumption when mining eth but unstable in games. Stock card, so I put 3mm pads under backplate where VRAMs are, lowering mem temperature by 6C in load..

RAM I leave overclocked @1.43V