Nvidia promises to fix high power consumption with high frequency screens

Dynamic refresh rates with AMD Freesync and Nvidia G-Sync are one of the biggest innovations in gaming screens for years. The phenomenon has also attracted more and more attention to high refresh rates, where many lavish models today go well over 120 Hz.

In October, PC Perspective discovered an odd behavior with Nvidia graphics cards when testing the gaming screen Asus ROG Swift PG279Q. At frequencies of 60-120 Hz, the power consumption of the test system with a Geforce GTX 980 Ti was 73.7-76.6 W at rest, which almost doubled to 133.9 W at the transition to 144 Hz and rose further to 137.8 W at 165 Hz, where a peak of 201 W was recorded.

We checked into the observation you highlighted with the newest 165Hz G-SYNC monitors. Guess what? You were right! That new monitor (or you) exposed a bug in the way our GPU was managing clocks for GSYNC and very high refresh rates. As a result of your findings, we are fixing the bug which will lower the operating point of our GPUs back to the same power level for other displays. We’ll have this fixed in an upcoming driver.

A statement from Nvidias states that this is a bug in how the graphics circuit’s clock frequencies are handled combined with really high refresh rates and G-Sync. However, this must be solvable via software and the company promises to deliver a solution with future drivers.