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.

Comments

And?

[4pins]

So I should swap out my video card to save a little power, drop a few frames and die a virtual death? I think they have their priorities backwards.

Re:And?

[Archangel Michael]

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"

Re:And?

[bobbied]

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"

To channel a story from yesterday... IF the tool is Python, the blame is well placed... ;)

Re:And?

[Anubis IV]

From the article (I know, I know, but I was curious):

"The huge bottom line here is that gamers don't have to sacrifice performance to save energy," Mills said. "You can have your cake and eat it too. In fact, the efficient systems run cooler and quieter, both of which are desirable attributes among gamers."

...and...

They were able to achieve a 50 percent reduction in energy use while performance remained essentially unchanged. Additional energy savings were achieved through operational settings to certain components, yielding total savings of more than 75 percent.

Which is to say, quite right, it sounds like they are talking about diminishing performance a bit, but if they've figured out some decent ways to cut the amount of energy the system is using, it would sound to me like they may have created some additional headroom for overclockers dealing with overheating. After all, a cooler system may indicate you're leaving untapped potential on the table.

Having looked through their site, it appears that all they've really done is calculate the cost per watt for the performance offered by various components, and have made some swaps to get similarly- or better-performing components that operate at lower wattages, but their research is far from comprehensive. For instance, they posted a market survey that covers the efficiency of 9 PSUs, but PSUs are already rated based on their efficiency (e.g. Platinum, Gold, Silver, Bronze), and there are significantly more comprehensive lists out there that address the topic of how well the PSUs live up to their claimed standard (and that are also updated regularly as new PSUs hit the market). Likewise, you can find similar work done for other components.

If their site had done a better job of pulling those various resources together so as to provide a better bang-for-your-buck on your utility bill list and was comprehensive enough that I didn't feel like they were leaving out the vast majority of the products aimed at gamers, I'd have been much more favorably-inclined towards them, but this kinda seems like a weekend project done by a father and son team who have environmental aspirations. Merit worthy, certainly, but not worth much consideration from gamers (yet?).

Re:And?

[AmiMoJo]

Actually that is the one area where TFA might actually have a point. Due to new technologies from AMD and Nvidia that sync the monitor refresh timing to the GPU instead of the other way around, a slightly less powerful GPU can provide essentially the same performance as a more powerful one did under the old system.

Basically if your monitor has a fixed 60Hz refresh rate then the GPU must be able to supply every frame in under 16.6ms. Any drops will be immediately noticeable. With flexible frame rate the GPU can go down to say 55Hz for a few frames, or even down to 50Hz and the player won't notice. Motion will still look fluid.

Okay, some gamers want 120Hz now, but the principal still applies.

Re:And?

[Anubis IV]

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.

Fuck Off

[Tokolosh]

Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.

H. L. Mencken

Re:Fuck Off

[AmiMoJo]

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.

Here's an obvious power saving solution...

[__aaclcg7560]

Wouldn't it be easier to TURN OFF the gaming computer when you're not using it?

If you read the article

[MasseKid]

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.

Re:If you read the article

[bobbied]

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...

Power saving settings are annoying

[mikethe1337]

Power saving settings on computers are super annoying. I work for a company whose software is ran in the cloud and the dang power saving settings on network cards make our program freeze in about 2 minutes of inactivity to save power annoying as heck to walk non-technical people through changing their windows power settings.

Re:Power saving settings are annoying

[lesincompetent]

Mod parent up. There's a time and a place for energy saving and sometimes it's NEVER.

bitcoin miners

[crtreece]

Hopefully this guy doesn't find out how much power is being used for bitcoin mining.

Ok, I've just skimmed the article and...

[RogueyWon]

How is it possible to take 20 pages to say so little that is actually meaningful? It basically boils down to "newer and/or lower performance components draw less power". No shit, Sherlock.

It's also rather misinformed when it comes to the availability of power-consumption information for gaming PC components. My current PC is a self-built gaming PC and I can assure you that when I was putting it together, power consumption information was absolutely something I looked at, because it affected my choice of PSU. And if you go to the manufacturers' websites, power consumption information is usually available upfront. If it's not, or if you want to know how it varies depending on loads, then there are any number of testing, benchmarking and review sites just a google search away.

There is probably an interesting article that could be written about minimising power consumption in a gaming PC, but it's not this one. In reality, power consumption is one aspect of a sensitive series of trade-offs. On graphics cards, for instance, you get get the same brute-force performance from AMD cards as you can from Nvidia cards at (usually) a much lower price - but the trade-off comes in heat and power consumption. So you can base your decision on a balance between how much you care about the up-front purchase costs of the card, vs ongoing power costs, potentially the cost of a new PSU and the noise/discomfort factor of having something that burns with the heat of a billion fiery suns in your PC. Most people building gaming PCs are not blind to this stuff.

The article reads like a lightweight piece of political advocacy for more regulation, trying to solve a problem which increasingly doesn't exist (the general trend over time is towards more power-efficient components and electricity prices act as a further restraint). So the author can, to be blunt, fuck right off.

Look at the prices

[dlenmn]

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.)