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Gaming Computers Offer Huge, Untapped Energy Savings Potential
Required Snark writes: According to Phys.org, a study by Evan Mills at Berkeley Lab shows that "gamers can achieve energy savings of more than 75 percent by changing some settings and swapping out some components, while also improving reliability and performance" because "your average gaming computer is like three refrigerators." Gaming computers represent only 2.5 percent of the global installed personal computer (PC) base but account for 20 percent of the energy use. Mills estimated that gaming computers consumed 75 TWh of electricity globally in 2012, or $10 billion, and projects that will double by 2020 given current sales rates and without efficiency improvements. Potential estimated savings of $18 billion per year globally by 2020, or 120 terawatt hours (TWh) are possible. Mills started the site GreeningtheBeast.org.
You can read the full paper as a PDF.
Wouldn't it be easier to TURN OFF the gaming computer when you're not using it?
So, what you're saying is that dropping from 1000 frames per second, to 950 FPS is all it takes to die?
My dad had a saying, I think it applies here: "A poor workman blames his tools"
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Mod parent up. There's a time and a place for energy saving and sometimes it's NEVER.
1) Don't care. Seriously. I pay for the power, if it gets more expensive, I pay for more units of electricity.
2) I don't go and blow a couple grand on PC components to have to worry about S3, S6 and other sleep states effect when recovering a power rig.
3) A great way to start the conversation is calling people's gaming computers "the beast" and suggesting someone should "green" anything. (/sarcasm)
4) greening the beast only works with no preceding subdomain (like www.) www.greeningthebeast.org fails
5) A google site? Seriously? Welcome to geocities in 2015.
6) Did this site publish a "market survey"? Really? Its a massive spreadsheet that is pretty much unexplained and someone expects gamers to make use of this? I've got experience in statistics and finance from my day job and some of this thing is still hieroglyphics to me.
6.5) Did I mention, I don't care about greening when it comes to my gaming rig? I think I did.
Hopefully this guy doesn't find out how much power is being used for bitcoin mining.
file:
If you read or even browse the paper, all he really says is if you use newer components, they are more energy efficient. Which is like well, pretty much everything else on the damn planet.
I wonder... Do they take into account the resources necessary to BUILD these new components and scrap the old ones?
I read once that it's more environmentally friendly to keep using an old building, car, etc over having to scrap the old one and build a new one...
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
What a strange attitude. If you could save money on electricity by simply buying more efficient components for the same price as inefficient ones, and by enabling some power saving options on your PC for free and all with no loss of performance, wouldn't it make sense to do so?
It's like pointing out that there is no point accelerating and braking hard in heavy traffic. You won't get there any quicker, you just waste money that you could spend on other stuff.
This instant angry reaction to anything involving energy saving is bizarre and makes no rational sense.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Although it's not perfect, money is a decent proxy for environmental harm.* So, if a $100 upgrade will save you $200 in electricity over its lifetime, then the upgrade will probably do more environmental good than harm. However, if a $500 upgrade will save you $100 in electricity, then you're probably doing more harm than good.
* At least for normal consumer goods, the price _roughly_ reflects the amount of energy and resources to manufacture the good, which roughly reflects the environmental harm. It's by no means a perfect metric, but it's a start. Some goods clearly do not fit this model. For example, a painting costs almost no resources to produce but can sell for a high price. Some computer parts are similar. For example, sometimes identical graphics cards are deliberately crippled (lower clock speed, parts of the processor disabled, etc.) just to create different price points. Both cards have the same environmental cost to produce but can have very different sale prices. However, that means the environmental cost is best represented by the cost of the _cheapest_ version. So maybe the aforementioned $500 upgrade really costs $50 to produce and thus has a positive environmental impact.
(Totally off topic: I wonder about the environmental impact of moving to cities. Say you move to a city, sell your car, etc. but your income remains constant; you instead spend money on a new TV, more beef for dinner, etc. Then it's not obvious to me that you're having a significant, positive environmental impact.)
My dad had a saying, I think it applies here: "A poor workman blames his tools"
Ehh...yes and no. A workman generally isn't competing against others, which is why he has no excuse. Not so with gamers.
If two craftsman are up against each other in a woodworking competition, their tools absolutely matter. Give one a dull blade to work with instead of the sharp one the other guy has, and he'd have every reason to complain about his tools and how they're affecting his ability to produce results. After all, the fact that he is fully capable of producing absolutely amazing results using just that dull blade doesn't matter one bit in a competition setting, since what matters in a competition is his ability to produce better results than the person he is competing against.
So it is with much of gaming.
A "craftsman" of the gaming world may be more than capable of producing amazing results on an everyday basis by wiping the floor with their opponents, regardless of their tools, but put them up against someone of similarly-masterful skill and their tools can absolutely make a load of difference.
That said, I actually agree with your sentiment, since computers, latency, and other factors get overused as excuses when the bigger issue is merely the player's competency. I recall back when I played vanilla World of Warcraft, I was getting 0.5 frames per second (i.e. 1 frame every two seconds; that is not a typo) at minimum settings in some of the raids, simply because I was at the time running the game on a laptop that was well under the minimum specs (the bug tunnel in AQ40 was particularly bad for me). Yet, despite that, I'd consistently come in with the least "overheal" and the second highest healing among the members of the 40-man raid (i.e. I healed the second most and did so with better efficiency than anyone else). When the raid leaders got wind of how poor my computer was, they started calling the other healers to task over their performances, since if I was able to produce those sorts of results with such a crappy setup, the others had no excuse.
All of which is to say, bad gamers do indeed blame their tools inappropriately in the vast majority of cases, but gamers also have better and more valid reasons for blaming their tools than a typical craftsman.