Costly rule

CucumberFetish@lemm.ee to 196@lemmy.blahaj.zone – 566 points –
70

Gaming on lower resolution because it's a pixel art game

  • Gaming on lower resolution because electricity prices are high.

  • Gaming on lower resolution because it removes obstacles and gives a tactical advantage.

  • Gaming on a new GPU because it's faster
  • Gaming on an old GPU because it's VRAM is dying and sometimes the walls disappear

Gaming on low resolution because the game is premised on low poly fun, not high end graphics covering for mediocre gameplay.

Just set a frame limit

It ticks me off when i see twitch streamers with the fps displayed and its running at 300+ fps. What a waste of electricity, money and hardware.

Eh, more frames means better latency, but up to what point it still makes sense is a whole other story.

Turn on Nvidia reflex/AMD Anti-Lag and you got both, lower latency and lower power usage

Reflex at 100 fps still won't compare to 300 fps without Reflex though

I wonder why, because technically it should be pretty much the same thing

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Already set. I'm not that competitive player and my reflexes are worse than a sloth's. So I didn't even bother to buy a higher refresh rate monitor than 60.

Not only does this reduce GPU power usage but CPU as well.

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My 7800xt pulls about 230 watts at full bore, giving me my monitor's refresh rate in FPS, 144. Limiting the framerate to 72 results in no tearing and drops the GPU watts to 170. Worth it.

Halving your frame rate is worth approximately a cent an hour?

Just consider! If you're gaming 80 hours a week you could save $3.50 off your monthly bill. 12 hours a day gaming, such savings!

Adding a frame limiter and dropping the resolution a bit saves me 200W. Yay RTX3090

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Retro gaming... Low res... CRT filter with the warped edges and blooooooom effects... this is the ideal way to play your SNES games. Try it with Super Metroid, that shit is straight up unnerving and beautiful.

This is why I do love that my PC is powered by renewable energy. It blows my mind how expensive power is everywhere else, plus I don't wanna game if it means I gotta roll coal like huge parts of the world.

I have a Watt-Meter right on my PC plug next to my monitor so I can always see how much I consume. It's crazy how much the monitors alone take up, it's kind 40 KW/h each. I'm considering removing one of them.

Do you mean kW or kWh?

Neither hopefully. The former at least is a unit of power, but 40 kW is enough to heat up a whole apartment building.

In reality a large and older monitor might use a couple hundred watts. A small modern 24" will probably use closer to 50 W (guesstimating), which is still a decent chunk of the power draw of a budget build.

True, they probably ment to say 40W, or as the EU energy label likes to say: 40kWh/1000h

40kWh/1000h

What? That’s a really stupid way to put it. You can’t just “per x hour” a per hour based unit.

40 kilowatt-hours used per one thousand hours of runtime is a perfectly valid if cumbersome unit

KWh is a measure of total energy, not instantaneous power. Your watt meter was saying that since last reset of the value it measured 40 KWh of energy use. That's not an insignificant amount - a Chevy Bolt can go around 180 miles on 40KWh. Watts, or kilowatts, are instantaneous power. That same Bolt can easily pull 100KW while accelerating and if it could somehow do that for an hour, it would have used 100KWh. It could never make it the whole hour as it has a 65KWh battery, so it would run out after 39 minutes.

What you're describing is kWh, not kW/h. You need to multiply power with time to get back to energy. An appliance using 1kW of power for 1h "uses" 1kWh of energy. The same appliance running for 2h requires 2kWh instead.

kW/h doesn't really make sense as a unit, although it could technically describe the rate at which energy consumption changes over time.

Autocorrect seems to disagree, but autocorrect doesn't know shit about power vs energy. Fixed it.

A typical wall outlet can only draw 1800w (1.8kw) no way is it drawing 40kwh (kw/h is a nonsense unit in this context). If it's drawing 40wh ghats actually quite low, a typical monitor is closer to 80-100w while powered on.

Where I live electricity is about 10c/kwh (cheap I know) so a 100w monitor is costing me about a cent an hour. More than worth it imo but you make your own decisions.

I game on lower resolution because a lot of modern games are too hyper detailed for me and I get lost in the crisp information density. That and I hate the sound of computer fans

I get lost in the crisp information density.

Man you're gonna hate this thing called the real world. I hear the pixels are mere nanometers across

That's the crisp part. A lot of modern games seem to be obsessed with making every single pixel pop out at you. Rummaging around outside is not like that it's softer. A real world comparison would be something like malls which are obsessed with making every inch of visible space distinctly pop. I also hate being in malls

Oh like too saturated and colorful. Yeah I get that

I've been replaying FFXIV recently and I had the game running at the maximum refresh rate of my monitor and it was making the fans run harder. it took me way too long to realise that I should just go a setting down for refresh rate instead of altering fan speeds.

  • Buying Noctua NH-D15 because it keeps the CPU the coolest
  • Buying 360mm AIO because it is the most silent

But seriously though, I cut off a good 30-40% from my GPUs power limit and would you look at that, I still enjoy the games I play.

Have to run most of them at low to medium settings anyway, so might as well.

Only thing left to improve it further would be undervolting, I should try that at some point.

Undervolt it too. Depending on what GPU you have, you might drop an additional 20-40% without a performance hit. An older GTX1070 I used to have dropped power consumption by 40%. The energy savings weren't that big, but it was nice and quiet

Currently using a GTX 970 on EndeavourOS, I believe tuxclocker can do undervolting, haven't tried it yet

Undervolting has the added benefit of reducing silicon degradation. I don't know how much it'll help your GPU, considering it's age, but it's something

I've put it through absolute overclocking hell, and it still runs as happily as it always did, so there's that.

Gaming on lower resolution because 480p just feels like home.

Games that drop framerate when game loses focus are fun. Something like Wurm or RS don't need fancier framerate when I'm not even looking!

Every game can do this. It's a setting in your GPU's control panel.

Gaming on a lower resolution because I'm playing a JRPG from the 90s.

Sometimes I'll lower resolution or quality just so a game loads quicker.