Nvidia is working to fix power draw issues at high refresh rates

Nvidia is working to fix power draw issues at high refresh rates

 

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. 

Now PCPER has reported that Nvidia has responded to them regarding this issue, saying that this bug will be resolved in an upcoming GPU driver. Below is Nvidia’s statement to PCPER.

 

We checked into the observation you highlighted with the newest 165Hz G-SYNC monitors.
 
Guess what? You were right! That new monitor (or you) exposed a bug in the way our GPU was managing clocks for GSYNC and very high refresh rates.
 
As a result of your findings, we are fixing the bug which will lower the operating point of our GPUs back to the same power level for other displays.
 
We’ll have this fixed in an upcoming driver.

 

  

It is great to see that Nvidia has been working on this issue and has not simply ignored PCPER’s findings, so hopefully those who are affected by this issue will have a fixed driver within the next few weeks or months. 

 

You can join the discussion on Nvidia’s upcoming power draw fix for high refresh rate displays on the OC3D Forums.