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NRDC Rates Energy Efficiency of Video Game Consoles
An anonymous reader writes "Today, more than 40 percent of all homes in the United States contain at least one video game console. Recognizing that all that gaming could add up to serious demand for electricity, NRDC and Ecos Consulting performed the first ever comprehensive study on the energy use of video game consoles and found that they consumed an estimated 16 billion kilowatt-hours per year — roughly equal to the annual electricity use of the city of San Diego. Through the incorporation of more user-friendly power management features, we could save approximately 11 billion kWh of electricity per year, cut our nation's electricity bill by more than $1 billion per year, and avoid emissions of more than 7 million tons of CO2 each year. In this November 2008 issue paper, NRDC provides recommendations for users, video game console manufacturers, component suppliers and the software companies that design games for improving the efficiency of video game consoles already in homes as well as future generations of machines yet to hit the shelves." The full report is freely downloadable as a PDF.
Through the incorporation of more user-friendly power management features
On consoles, it's called the "power button".
Suggesting console manufacturers implement power-saving features is like asking Ferrari or Hummer to make their vehicles as efficient as a Corolla or Civic.
Power-saving measures make sense for PCs and especially for servers because there's a LOT of inertia involved in powering them on and off. Load times are bad enough as far as consoles are concerned -- introducing yet more waiting is a bad idea. I'll work off my potential guilt by riding my bike to the store instead of driving after playing XBox360 or PS3.
$1 billion/300 million = $3.
Yay.
That console might use what, 100 watts of electricity? Your microwave cooking for twenty minutes is equal to running that console for over two hours.
Your toaster is 1000 watts. The five minutes it takes to make toast uses the same electricity as the console running almost an hour.
Let's not even talk about your furnace blower, refrigerator, clothes dryer, dishwasher, let alone a space heater.
Meanwhile, consoles plug into the TV. My TV uses 250 watts of juice. YMMV depending more on your brand of TV the console is plugged into than the actual console.
Want to save energy? Turn your PC system off at night unless you've got a giant download, are running a server, or some other valid reason to have it on.
Replace those 100 watt incandescant bulbs with 25 watt CFL twirley bulbs. I don't have any more incandescants; If I leave every light in the house on it still doesn't equal my TV set, let alone dishwasher.
Your console's energy use is not the problem.
Free Martian Whores!
So does this mean those ps3's sitting around at full CPU utilization for days and days add up to give Folding@Home one of the largest carbon footprints of any non-profit? Of course I'm not being serious with my title, but how's that compare to the energy costs, efficiency, and carbon foot print of an equivalent blue-gene/L supercomputer?
How much of San Diego's electricity usage is from game consoles?
The thing they're ignoring is the Fun factor.
If you want to measure efficiency, you do it by comparing energy consumed to work accomplished.
So, if console A has a fun factor of 5, and consumes 1 unit of energy, but console B has a fun factor of 15 and consumes 2 units of energy, then console B is more efficient.
The only way to solve this equation is to understand the value of fun.
Clearly, we need to create a International Fun Agency to test for this if we're ever going to make our games more efficient, reduce our dependence on foreign oil, reduce taxes and save the children.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
In looking at the power consumption figures on Page 10-12 it's amazing the difference between Nintendo and the other Console Makers.
MS Xbox off 3.1 W Idle 117.5 W Active 118.8 W
SonyPS3 off 1.1 W Idle 152.9 W Active 150.1 W
N's Wii off 1.9 W Idle 10.5 W Active 16.4 W
That's just some of the numbers and no typo's Nintendo is an order of magnitude more efficient when running. Amazing. The more and more I learn about the Wii and Nintendo's current business the more impressed I am.
The rock, the vulture, and the chain
Ah, but the western governments would soon institute a ministry of fun, and that would quickly come to the realisation that it would be best for the children if fun were banned entirely.
Here's an easy solution.
MS and Sony (and Nintendo) should make a series of simple alterations to their programming and production line machines, as follows:
#1 - When you hit the power button, it goes OFF. Not just "low power", and certainly not Sony's PS3 "still burning more energy than a 75W light bulb" mode.
I recognize this will lose the remote-control ease of "powering up" the device using the Home/Xbox/Power button from the controller. Tough. Get up and walk the fucking five feet to the box to turn it on. I also recognize that this may not be possible with the current already-installed base (though I bet the PS3 could spin down a hell of a lot more than it does).
But even if you can't do this to the currently-installed base, you can CERTAINLY do this next one:
#2 - Enough with the damn system clock. If you want to have a clock, have it ping an NTP server somewhere (heck, give the user a choice of which government or private-industry one they want to ping) for the time when it comes up. If it comes up without a clock and the user doesn't bother with the setting, the user obviously doesn't worry enough about it to care. The only thing you use it for anyways is marking a time/datestamp on savegames, which could just as easily be stored as the amount of gameplay time spent in the game rather than time/datestamping. Not only that, but your system clocks suck and have to be regularly reset anyways. Neither the Wii, nor Xbox360, nor PS3 is programmed to be a PVR or anything like that, so they have no reason to have a clock. At all.
Same thing for so many other devices: there is no reason for my coffee maker, or my toaster, or anything else to know what time it is. None. At all. I am not, I swear to god am NOT, going to put two pieces of toast in the toaster when I leave for work, then call home and enter a six-digit code from my cell phone when I'm 10 minutes away just so I have hot toast waiting after I walk in the door. And even if I did, that function would STILL not require my toaster to know what time it was, only that it had just received a code saying "toast. Now." And when I consider that the amount of energy my toaster expended simply waiting for that command could probably toast a whole fucking loaf, even having it networked in the first place is a waste of energy.
Added bonus: users could just hit the power switch on their surge protector to REALLY cut everything off if they want to, without having to worry about resetting the clocks later. The one reason I don't do this nowin my living room is that it's annoying enough to have to reset clocks after a 5-minute power outage, I don't want to have to do every time just to play a game. I do, on the other hand, do this for my various kitchen gadgets that have "standby" modes and they've never missed a beat (even found, after much research, a microwave model where I don't have to reset the fucking clock just to cook something).
We waste far too much power on "standby" modes for everything, and it's getting annoyingly hard to even find a device that truly turns OFF any more.
Finally, a note to EVERY company that makes products:
I DO NOT NEED TO HAVE A GLOWING RED LIGHT JUST TO KNOW MY DEVICE IS TURNED OFF.
I mean seriously, my living room looks like it's fucking christmas even when everything's turned off. I kill the lights and the collection of little red LED's from my TV, stereo system, and vcr/dvd player/game systems is collectively bright enough for me to see my black cat sneaking around to try to run between my legs and trip me while I go upstairs to bed. My various electronic devices stare out at me in the night like a deranged collection of fruit fuckers.
If it's on, I expect a status light perhaps. A happy little, not-too-bright green light or a system clock (for an older VCR or Tivo or something) saying "yeah, I'
The study shows that many people leave their PS3s on all the time, and the power difference between running F@H and idle is small, so it's really the PS3 that's killing the planet. If you're going to waste power anyway, you might as well do some folding.
However, there is no reason a console should use 100W when idle. A laptop can drop its power consumption by a factor of 10 when it's idle; why can't a game console?
Moving from the UK to the US, one of the things I miss is having an on/off switch on every electrical socket. It's much easier to flip a switch than have to pull/push plugs. I can also be sure a device is truly off, and not slowly leaching power like the umpteen power adapters I have.
I'd love to start replacing the outlets I have with switched varieties, but I haven't found anything yet. Either my google-fu is weak, or I'm searching for the wrong thing. Anyone know where I can find such a thing?
There are so many electronics in the house that are using more than a watt of power in standby that it can add up to a 100 euro per year for a single house hold. Not that much, but you could have used that 100 Euro for something fun.
And to be honest this whole 1 or 2 watts isn't needed for standby. My projector, a panasonic PT-EA1000, is one of the few pieces of equipment that only uses 80mW of power in standby. Other manufactures should think of doing this to their equipment.
For the persons who like to know:
- You power your standby electronics straight from mains power, through a resistor and a voltage regulator. This works because the standby electronics is very low power.
- The standby electronics controls a relay that switches the power supply for the rest of the equipment.