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Most Game Console Power Draw Comes From Time Spent Idling
hypnosec writes "Springer Science and Business Media has discovered that during 2010, almost 70 per cent of the overall power draw of the world's consoles was thanks to idling. This total came to over 10.8 TWh of energy, equating to well over a billion dollars in wasted power. The biggest culprit for the trio of main consoles of this generation was the PlayStation 3, with its first edition having an active power draw of 180 watts and an idling draw of 167. As the report states, the Xbox 360 wasn't much better however, with active/idle draws of 172/162w respectively. Both of those consoles have got far better with their hardware revisions, more than halving the idle power consumption, but the Wii has been ahead of the curve the whole time. Its active/idle power draws were as low as 16/11w. The only real difference with the Nintendo console was whether its WC24 was enabled or not. With it on, standby power jumped from 2w to 9w."
What exactly is the purpose of gaming consoles today? These days, they're merely locked-down PCs that are several years out of date, and damn near impossible to upgrade. It's not the games, since many of them target every major console and non-console platform these days. It's not the graphics quality, since PCs offer much better quality imagery. It's not the controllers, because there is a much wider range of options for PCs. It's not their networking abilities, given that consoles were many years behind PCs in this respect.
While consoles make sense for the businesses who want to lock-in users, they make absolutely no sense for consumers. PCs are a much better option in every way possible.
What truly shocked me about the PS3 was to find that attached controllers do not appear to charge unless the console is powered on.
This is an absurd state of affairs and has, apparently, persisted through hardware revisions. The device itself can power on overnight from standby and sync with the PS network/download patches etc, but you need to wake the thing to charge the controller. This encourages the device being left on 24x7 with all the expense and environmental consequences that go along with that.
oh standby power is more like 2 wats. they mean with idle a homescreen running attract mode...
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
I've always used a power board with a switch for my PC, and when the PC is off I also turn the switch off. So no motherboard or monitor LEDs working.
Is this a common thing to do or do most people just leave all this stuff on?
10,800,000 kWh is 10.8 GWh not 10.8 TWh. 10.8 TWh is 10,800,000,000 kWh which would be $1,360,800,000 at your rates. Also, does that rate include distribution charges or only generation charges?
Sorry, you're off by a prefix. 10.8 TWh = 10,800 GWh = 10,800,000 MWh = 10,800,000,000 kWh * $0.126/kWh = $1,360,800,000 = $1.3 billion.
we can't do something like this with our gaming consoles, when they are idle.
What they calculated is the cost of camping.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
I wonder how much energy is lost for devices (including TV's and cars) to always be in "standby mode" listening for an IR wakeup.
That's a nice feature, but we didn't have that 15-20 years ago and I remember we went about our daily activities quite well. Plus, that would eliminate an attack vector for hackers for items like cars.
Do you think the all electrical companies run cost-free and bill consumers for 100% of their internal costs? I highly doubt it.
Yes they bill you for more than 100%. Otherwise they would run at a loss.
If you find a typo, you may keep it.
Just for comparison my desktop computer is drawing 71 Watts right now, with the flatscreen monitor drawing an additional 38 Watts. The monitor eventually drops down to using about 1 Watt when it is in the sleep mode. At the moment I have my computer plugged into a Kill-A-Watt meter. I have occasionally had the monitor also plugged into a Kill-A-Watt meter.
I have an Intel i7 processor and am using Kubuntu Linux on this desktop computer. Of course, it uses more power than that I work it harder.
They bill you exactly as much as they want, has nothing to do with cost of production.
Can I light a sig ?
No they don't run cost free and yes they do bill consumers for every penny of their costs. What were you trying to ask?
10,800,000 kWh is 10.8 GWh not 10.8 TWh. 10.8 TWh is 10,800,000,000 kWh which would be $1,360,800,000 at your rates. Also, does that rate include distribution charges or only generation charges?
That includes everything. It's the consumer's cost.
A very simple thing you can do to get the attention of the console makers is to call them and ask them how much power your particular system draws when playing and when sleeping, how this will cost you where you live, what you can do reduce the power usage, how to enable deep sleep mode and when they will come out with a reduced power model. Also let the game makers know that you want them to support auto power down.
BTW, the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) is really an amazing environmental group. They are just the environmental group that shows up at those deadly dull EnergyStar standards meetings and they do it with a full time electrical engineers. The NRDC engineering team is very bright and well informed. Very much worthy of your support.
cable boxes also use a lot of power but why can't the DRV spin down the HDD when it's off? It's not likey they are pushing out stuff to it 24/7 or at the very least some stuff can sit in ram.
Yes, you are very much incorrect:
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=10.8+TWh+times+0.126+dollar%2FkWh
I'd say about a thousand times.
there is no "you need more ram", but only a "needs at least a ps2". so you do not need to upgrade too often.
When I did the above post, I had not yet noticed where it said that the consoles got better with later revisions. So, it sounds like they probably are not as much different from my desktop computer now. When, I get a chance, I will read one or both of the linked articles to see what they have to say.
A laptop or notebook computer would probably use even less than my computer. As far as I can tell, my desktop computer does not seem to be set to go into a sleep mode. Only my flatscreen monitor clearly goes into sleep mode. However, most of the time the CPU cores are running at about half speed. My knowledge about all that is pretty limited. It is when doing something like posting on Slashdot, that my computer uses 71 W plus 38 W for the monitor.
I had to post very quickly, without reading the linked articles, before going off to do a couple of errands.
My appliances only use positive and negative charges. Why do they bill me for this other stuff?
When you start using free quarks for power. Inside a neutron star.
This is a classic example of free market failure. Making the consoles more efficient costs the manufacturers money. There's the cost to add power gating transistors to all the multi-core chips, use more expensive versions of the same chip binned for lower power consumption, and write the firmware to maximize power efficiency.
All this will create a benefit that the consumers cannot perceive, directly. Almost no consumers own a Kill-a-Watt, and they don't have any options because there are not many competing consoles, there are only 3, and they are not remotely equivalent to each other. (a consumer unhappy with xbox/ps3 power consumption will not get the same gaming experience on the Wii)
Most PVR's have USB ports, I use those to charge my PS3 controllers due to Sony's lack of function.
While this may be true with the Wii (as in I haven't really looked into it, ever), have you forgotten about the issues other consoles have had with games, where it works on some consoles but not others of the same type?
Because of the low failure rates and short time periods involved, we assume that all consoles sold are in active use. F
we assume that 30 % of users leave their console idle when not in use, with the remainder putting their console into standby mode. Given the importance of this assumption, we perform a thorough sensitivity analysis, discussed at length in “Results: estimated console energy consumption”. The PS3 and Xbox 360 have both added an “auto power down” capability through firmware updates, but this feature is not enabled by default and is difficult to find in system menus. We believe that this feature is not frequently utilized by consumers, and we neglect its effects on overall power consumption.
hmmmm ....
Correct. There are several modes in the EnergyStar spec. They boil down to active play, idle (think mario tapping his toe waiting for you to wiggle the control, but you've not pressed pause. same power as active play), paused (usually close to active power levels), at the home menu (also close to active levels), background network activity and sleep. Any reasonable bit of modern electrics should be able to listen to an IR/Bluetooth signal under 1/2W. Also, game developers really need to cooperate, do some book marking and drop into sleep if the user has not been playing for a few minutes and have a quick restore capability.
I heat my house with electricity. Power from idle devices offsets the load from heating - two orders of magnitude higher than idle draws in the very cold months. My home rack puts out enough heat to keep my office comfortable all winter, and I power down in summer, as I'm out doing things. No AC here. I've looked at doing things like having a small greenhouse indoors, etc - the base heat I'm paying for is good electricity turned directly into heat.
Of course, if you have AC, then you pay double - once for the heat generation from waste, and again to remove it.
Nothing in life is that black and white.
..don't panic
Am I the only person who noticed that their graphs differentiate between idle and standby? Without even reading the whole article, it's pretty obvious from that graph alone that their conclusion about wasted power is flawed. Is it any surprise that a console, powered up with software running, uses comparable energy whether someone is holding the controller or not? In "standby" mode, which is how my consoles spend most of their time when not in use, the consoles use less than 1% of that energy. FUD.
It is difficult to free fools from the chains they revere.
-Voltaire
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USB gamepads I'll grant you, but emulators of what platforms? Probably old consoles. There aren't enough PC games designed for USB gamepads (plural), and CronoCloud keeps telling me there's no market for such games because not enough people have a PC hooked up to a TV.
You can drive a projector from a PC.
Despite that this is the case, most people don't know that this is the case. Home theater PCs are still a geek thing.
there's no technical reason not to support properly implement them in games.
But plenty of business reasons, as David Wong of Cracked points out. For one thing, the publisher gets to sell two to four copies to a single household if the game's multiplayer is LAN- or online-only. In addition, the genres traditionally popular on PCs (FPS and RTS) rely on hiding information from your opponents, and before Xbox Live existed, FPS gamers went to LAN and online play on PCs precisely to avoid the sort of screen peeking familiar to any Goldeneye 007 veteran. The genres traditionally popular on consoles tend not to get ported to the PC at all except for token efforts (e.g. no major fighters other than SFIV).
Even if you just optimize for Ivy Bridge graphics, you can still hit playable frame rates with PS3-class scene complexity. Skyrim on an Intel HD 4000 hits 46 fps at 720p-class resolution with AA off.
No one said you had to have a PC in your living room.
In order to have console-style multiplayer games, you need a monitor big enough for two to four people to fit around. I'm told the only kind of monitor like that is a living room HDTV.
A Mac is a PC
Even under your definition, far fewer PC games are exclusive to Mac OS X than are exclusive to Windows.
If you prefer consoles, then what do you do when you want to play a game developed by someone who hasn't yet had a chance to move to Austin, Boston, Seattle, or another city with a similarly high concentration of console-licensed publishers?
True, there are USB cables to dump your GBA Game Paks through the multiplayer link cable, and there are flash linkers that look sort of like CompactFlash readers but have a GBA cart slot instead of a CF slot. I in fact own one of each, which I used during the GBA homebrew development era (2002 through ~2006). But GameCube and Wii game discs use a slightly modified version of the low-level DVD sector format. (It isn't spinning backwards, as is rumored, but a variation in the whitening polynomial and the error-correcting code.) When you buy these game discs, what do you use to read them on your PC?
It is incredibly unlikely that a console system will use less power while active than while playing a game. However, because the idle power is still high, these systems use most of their ENERGY while idle.
Interestingly, when it comes to efficiency, they get the units right. The unit is gigaflops per watt. In each of these units, the seconds cancel out, giving us billions of operations per joule, which is what we want.
Do you even know what that means? The court case establishing First Sale Doctrine was about books -- an item which does not generally tend to continue to depreciate over time and does not require money to be spent on repairs and renovations.
Electricity is too cheap.
It's not just that it is cheap (though it isn't hugely expensive it can over the lifetime of a device become comparable to the cost of the device itself), it's also that the cost is distributed and hidden (not to mention difficult to calculate because determining average power draw requires information on the ammount of time that will be spent in each state). If the customer was fully aware of the cost of an appliances lifetime electricity use then differences in average power consumption should make a substantial difference to the price the customer is willing to pay at least in warmer climates (in cooler climates the difference is less significant because of displaced heating but still looking at my bills natural gas is arround 1/3 the price per kwh that electricity is).
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
The end result is as if I'd ripped them myself but without the hassle of actually doing it.
What color are your bits?
What do they mean by "idling"?
#1 In-game, doing nothing?
#2 Or plugged in but no user input (CPU HALT) but still refreshing the screen buffer?
#3 Or plugged in and in "sleep"?
I doubt #3 (162W idle is HUGE...) I'm guessing #1 because the CPU in both systems would definitely go into a lower C-state....
In which case, I don't think the word idling means what they think it means....
https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
Yeah, given the very high number of failures (early on) for Xboxes, and (later on) for 1st gen PS3s, I really doubt most of the original systems are still operating.
Where do they get the figure that 30% of console owners leave their console idling (with which I assume they mean the device being fully powered on but there are just no buttons pressed on the controller). That sounds like bullshit to me.
Don't compare a gaming console with a desktop computer.
Compare it with a gaming computer.
Even mid end graphics cards these days, consume 200w+.
- Don't do what I do, it's probably not healthy nor safe. -
I'm not seeing an equivalent to a Wii Remote / Nunchuk and games which use it in an interesting way for a PC. So, motion control gaming (and the fact that the Wii is low-power) is a big win for Nintendo.
I've had an awful lot of fun playing Red Steel 2 and Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword (and to a lesser extent the IR-aimed shooting games like Goldeneye 007 and Metroid Prime Trilogy).
William
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
What is timothy there for?
A counter example? A warning to others?
--
EXPERIENCE IS what you get when you didn't get what you wanted.