Nvidia’s Power Draw at 144+Hz on desktop is higher than on AMD

Nvidia’s Power Draw at 144+Hz on desktop is higher than on AMD

 

When PCPER was looking at ASUS’ ROG Swift PG27799Q 165Hz G-Sync monitor they had discovered that the power consumption of Nvidia’s GTX 980Ti dramatically increased when running on the desktop, taking system power consumption from 76.6w to 201w when running at the displays 165Hz refresh rate. 

When they discovered this PCPER decided to test the same thing on AMD, and descovered that on AMD’s R9 Fury GPU that the on AMD the same jump in power consumption didn’t occur. This mean that when on the desktop AMD’s R9 Fury GPU consumes much less power than Nvidia’s GTX 980Ti when running a 144Hz or above refresh rate, at least at this monitors 1440p resolution. 

 

    

[Nvidia GTX 980Ti Left, AMD R9 Fury Right (image from PCPER)]

 

What causes this issue is the fact that Nvidia’s GTX 980Ti has to increase the GPUs clock speeds to run at desktop at 144Hz or above refresh rates at 1440p, which means that the GPU takes in more power. 

As can be seen for the AMD graphs for power and clock speeds that it does not need to increase it’s clock speeds to run the desktop at 165Hz, meaning that you do not see any meaningful jump in power consumption.  

 

    

[Nvidia GTX 980Ti Left, AMD R9 Fury Right (image from PCPER)]

 

Right now it is unknown if what has caused this issue on Nvidia, whether it is due to the G-sync module, Nvidia drivers or of it is an issue with how Nvidia’s GPU architecture deals with these refresh rates. 

 

You can join the discussion on Nvidia’s GTX 980Ti using more power at a 144Hz+ refresh rate at the desktop on the OC3D Forums.