The amount of carbon this has undoubtedly put into our atmosphere is really my main concern. Yes I know you can do hacky workarounds to fix this, but how many of their consumers did this? Roughly none. What a waste of our planets resources.
Do patchnotes count as statements? Because this has been addressed repeatedly and fixed for most users.
The problem is that it is a complex issue that is mostly due to badly configured monitors causing unnecessarily aggressive refresh cycles and high memory clock, and is being fixed for each individual monitor, one by one.
There is a reason it was basically ignored for years (it goes way back and impacts all GPUs, RDNA3 is nothing new aside from having higher memory power draw). Nobody wanted to open this can of worms.
Also worth looking into how much power your actual monitors use if you are worried about idle power use, since this mostly impacts people with 3+ mismatched monitors.
I have one monitor and a 7900xtx and my stays around 7-30
I also had the same issue. I could get 7-10 on dual monitor but 3 monitors never went below 100w.
I changed to a 4090 and my idle is 25-30w with 3 monitors.
Like others say nvidia has same issues with 3000 series. The Nvidia placebo is real.
BS.
Same problem here. I have the first generation Alienware OLED as my main monitor, and a secondary Dell S2522HG 1080p 240hz in portrait mode as my secondary monitor.
If I use both monitors at their max refresh rates my desktop not-doing-a-damn-thing power usage is 95w.
When I cap both down to 144hz and use 10 bit color + HDR on the OLED, it drops down to about 35-45w. It’s perfectly usable like this, but I’m still peeved that it’s necessary to gimp my monitors like this. 144hz on the OLED is fine and it’s not noticeable, but I can tell the difference in smoothness going down from 240hz. This only really matters though when I’m coding and hyper scrolling.
Not sure what mean you mean make “a statement” but idle power was listed as a known issue in early drivers and there’s been a ton of work on this.
Driver 23.7.1 did a lot to reduce idle power consumption. There was more work in 21.8.1. And I expect it’s an area of continued investigation. Though it can be difficult considering all the different possible PC/monitor setups. Often it’s a case of memory having to clock high to keep up with high refresh rate monitors.
Some your might try, if you can, is enabling VRR. That was shown to have a measurable effect.
If the is was true, there would be at least one monitor setup that does below 50w at idle with a dual setup, 144hz and 60hz.
I don’t think the internet has seen that on a 7000 series with dual mismatched, ever, without a workaround to lower refresh.
So could we get model numbers of monitors to test to verify this is being worked on? Could give a lot of people hope. Thanks.
Mine idles at 7w with two monitors. The trick for me was enabling Free sync on both of them.
MIne does 5w idle with 3x 1080p monitors.
The trick was to reduce the 165 Hz to 60 Hz…
That’s not a good ‘solution’ - what if someone wants to game on 120 hz variable refresh rate?
So you just play at 60Hz now.
So fuck people who dont have freesync, right?
I have my monitors lose signal randomly when freesync is on. 🤷
Sounds like a hardware issue
Mine idles around 20w on 3 monitors, none of them have Fresync. 2x 1080p60hz and 1x 1440p75hz
Considering my PC is on usually like 12-16h a day (I work from home) and my 4090 eats about 17W at idle (1440p 240Hz + 1080p 240Hz or 4K 120Hz), I wonder if it is already cheaper compared to if I got a 7900xtx instead.
Doing a little calculator check, you probably only saved around 50 to 100 bucks depending on how expensive electricity is in your area. Of course this number will only increase over time. Looking back, i’d probably recommend a 4080 over a 7900xtx to my brother. He can’t even run it full speed because of the massive heat it produces (400w) full load and the idle power use.
Electricity in EU can easily be 0.4$ per kWh depending on the country. If we assume 80w difference, 14h per day and 0.4$/kWh u get about 140$ per year.
But you don’t sit 14h per day doing nothing, don’t you? You can consider only idle (doing literally nothing), browsing and watching movies for this power draw, so it may be max 8h if you work at home, but maybe 2h if you use your PC primarly for gaming so the cost would be ~20$. It’s still wasted money and it shouldn’t happen, but realistically it’s nowhere near 140$.
Yeah, AMD stop mentioning this issue in there driver notes. I idle at 55 watts on average with my 7900 XTX using a 1440p 240hz and a 1440p 144hz capped to 60hz dual monitors.
I did get 50W idle with 2x 60 Hz monitors (1 4K and 1 FHD) with 7900 xtx months ago. Change to 4090 now get 30W idle on 1x 4K 60 Hz and 1x 4K 144 Hz.
you would see 110+ on that setup on AMD right now.
For anyone still experiencing this issue… make sure your desktop recording is DISABLED in adrenalin. Should drop to around 30w after that.
Mine flickers between 26w and 27w with only the monitor on screen.
What triggers this high usage?
I use a 3440 x 1440p LCD screen at 165hz
Asrock Phantom Gaming OC 7900xtx
Idle power draw ranges between 10-30W
I don’t get the high usage you mentioned
I think it’s when you use 2 monitors witha dif refresh rate and/or resolution
I’ve got the triple threat, 3 monitors at different resolutions and refresh rates. 1440p 144hz, 3440x1440p 165hz, 4k 120hz. Idle power draw is 120w. The fan doesn’t shut off unless ambient temp falls below 72f/~22c.
Did you try the latest AMD driver and using free sync?
I think this is the worst example i have seen so far, most people with messy configs only manage 100w.
I’m good at really fucking shit up /s
I think the real answer is that most people aren’t running three monitors that are all main-worthy. Much more common to see a higher refresh 1080p screen get moved as a second monitor to a new higher res screen, or a couple of matching side monitors purchased to compliment a single good main monitor. I’ve upgraded resolutions and just stuck my old main monitor on the side 3 times now, with a 1080p 240hz monitor being given to a friend when I upgraded the third time.
Or select single monitor set ups.
Ah ok, cheers
I believe it occurs most commonly with dual monitor setups
Because a dual monitor setup is pretty common… it sounds like any setup that is more than 1 monitor - when at least one or more monitors are more than 60 hz - then it happens? I dunno if resolution impacts anything - if they have more than one monitor, these days, it seems that at least one is higher than 1080p.
The amount of carbon emitted depends on your region’s power mix. At night, when solar is unavailable, yes, it might be higher, but honestly, 100W is nothing (0.1kW). If your PC isn’t put to sleep or turned off, and instead idles most of the day, those are entirely your emissions.
Level 3 EV chargers at dedicated stations draw up to 200kW (50/100kW vehicles are common now), so imagine when 95% of the world population has EVs. We’re rapidly heading toward disaster without the necessary infrastructure and no one wants to hear it.
Humans breathe out CO2 as well (and expel methane, an even stronger GHG), and there’s 8+ billion of us doing that 24/7. We’re carbon-based life, so carbon is always going to be emitted. The issue is that we deforested and paved over our carbon sinks because we’re shortsighted anytime money is involved.
Also, good luck solving your issue.
Yeah you put it in better perspective than anybody. You are right, It’s incredibly minuscule, but I think there’s value to caring about every Wh or kWh. A little bit everywhere goes a long ways
I don’t know if I truly solved my idle power issue, but for my single monitor setup it’s kinda ok.
DDU, if you had another GPU before the 7900XTX, doesn’t matter if it’s an AMD GPU. DDU anyway.
Turn off desktop recording. Instant replay and desktop recording, both being turned on causes the memory to clock higher. You can have one on, but not both.
Don’t monitor the power using the overlay with other metrics. That’s not idling at all I think.
It’ll sometimes idle at 25W, sometimes 8+W. I came back home and saw the idle wattage after the monitor woke up to be 5W. So it’s idling when it matters for my use case.
Dual monitor setup? Single monitor doesn’t have this problem anymore