Has anyone ever measured how much power a system saves when limiting the game to 60 FPS?

Hi all

I am wondering, with the higher end cards one can get 100+ FPS.
Has anyone measured the system power when running unlimited versus 30 or 60 FPS?
For games like Stellaris, Terra Nil or InfraSpace more frames make no difference because there is no input lag and energy is expensive in Europa.

Cheers

How much you’re gonna save depends heavly on the resolution and detail level you’re playing at. Also, if you wanna factor in the display aswell, you would ideally switch that to 60Hz aswell to save power on it. The efficiency of the CPU contributes not insignificantly to the overall gain in efficiency if you run a game at 60fps.
It would be interesting to know but it varies heavly depending on the system you’re using.

You can do some rough math using the power sensors off your motherboard and GPU.

Reduce PPT by 30-40% and you lose only like 10% performance. Same with CPUs. Bath tub curve is a thing in semiconductors. Default power limits are usually very inefficient values, but good for benchmarks and sales.

I never set fps limits in games, I just tell my GPU to run at lower wattage. And get back to full power if I want that extra 10% boost.

Actually yes, some sites do measure GPU power draw with V-Sync and 60Hz.

1 Like

What are the testing conditions? The graph doesn’t mean anything on its own.

  • V-Sync: If you don’t need the highest framerate and want to conserve power, running at 60 FPS is a good option. In this test, we run Cyberpunk 2077 at 1920x1080, capped to 60 FPS. This test is also useful in testing a graphic card’s ability to react to situations with only low power requirements. For graphics cards that can’t reach 60 FPS at 1080p, we report the power draw at the highest achievable frame rate.

Methodology is posted per review, but generally remains unchanged.

2 Likes

I like this graph where unlimited gaming consumes 160W and 60FPS ~75W. This is quite the substantial difference, I see why cloud gaming is usually capped at 60.

Thank you!

I’d say it’s probably more to remove tearing/part of the pipeline. The video feed is only 60fps anyway, and the encoder doesn’t need to wait for vblank, just a complete frame to render. Since there’s a buffer in the client anyway, delayed frames just come through when they’re done, and get sorted by the client device.
If the game tried to run over 60, it’d just build up the buffer or start dropping frames, both of which are undesirable.

Enterprise GPUs use much lower power targets, aimed at maximum efficiency in the first place. You can do the same by reducing power targets in something like MSI Afterburner, as someone previously pointed out.

Have you been able to do that under Linux as well?

1st, I always use V-Sync, even with 60fps panel.
With high refresh rate panel, if you only play 8 hours game per week on average, the saving is negligible. For me, the gaming experience is more important.

did this the other day with assassins creed origins…
i ran max fps and which was bouncing around 120-150 for the benchmark…
hwinfo showed 340w for the gpu power draw.
i enabled vsync to 60 and set max fps to 61 (+1 render ahead frame).
hwinfo showed a max draw of 250w.
so about 30% less power draw.
eventually i got it down to 220w by turning eco mode on, on the cpu…

spec rtx 3070, 5900x, 4x8gig 3000 (replacing soon)

1 Like

had a bit more of a play around.
using msi afterburner i set max power draw to 80%
ran the benchmark and lost about 10-20fps from the top end and 5ish from the average.



Untitled2

as the minimum is 62 i wont lose anything as i run my games at 60fps vsync on.

If my math is correct: for a 20% power reduction you get roughly 5% less FPS?

1 Like

a little over 20% as the cpu is topping out at around 110w rather than the max 145w.
it still does 4.925 and is limited to 80’c before throttling.
all told i think im saving closer to 30%. without losing much at all.

1 Like

This topic was automatically closed 273 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.