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Over the next few weeks, I'm going to TRY to accurately measure my power consumption doing daily work tasks on my big tower PC, the Steam Deck, and the HP Dev One laptop. (Using a Kill-A-Watt P3).
ALSO? Gaming power consumption comparisons between my desktop PC & the Xbox Series X, both at 4K resolution.
I expect it will be an eye-opening experience and I'll never turn on my tower again.
This will undoubtedly branch off into all kinds of software testing too. YES, I'll record & share data...
Oregon Coast Trail @killyourfm@layer8.spaceI ran some power consumption tests on #Windows 11, measuring from the wall.
My system: Ryzen 9 3900X, Radeon RX 6800 XT, 32GB RAM.
1% CPU utilization (Idle): 67W
5% CPU + 10% GPU (Streaming with Plex): 130W
Dirt 5 Benchmark (4K, High Preset, Uncapped FPS): 431W
Dirt 5 Benchmark (4K, High Preset, 60FPS Cap): 355W
Dirt 5 Benchmark (1440p, High Preset, 60FPS) Cap) : 288W
The power savings gained JUST from capping FPS to 60 is more than 2x the total power of a #SteamDeck under heavy load.
Starting #Fedora 38 power consumption tests, and decided to see how much extra power gets consumed by simply switching refresh rate from 60Hz to 120Hz (as this demands more work from the #Radeon card).
[As a refresher, it's a tower PC w/ #AMD Ryzen 3900X + Radeon RX 6800 XT]
- 1% CPU utilization (idle) @ 60Hz: 67W (this is the same result as Windows 11, btw)
- 1% CPU utlilization (idle)@ 120Hz: 97W
So an extra 30W pulled from the wall just to double my desktop refresh rate. Is it worth it?
In the UK, at 8 hours of operation per day, that 120Hz refresh rate boost would only result in about £30 per year.
But that ecological footprint multiplied by millions of people? Well, that might truly suck. Especially when we add up all the other "quality of life" things we enjoy with modern desktop PCs.
(I don't know how to make these calculations, and maybe this is something that @be4foss or @baldpolnareffart would excel at?)
@killyourfm Thats a lot! My 2018 MacBook under full load uses the same amount of power like your idle system.
And to clarify does this include the screen(s) and peripherals or just compute?
@vsaw This is JUST the PC! (I can only measure one input on the Kill-a-Watt)
@killyourfm If you are interested in measuring your entire setup, You could get an extension cord plug all devices in and measure all of them at once with the Kill-a-watt.
@vsaw Huh. that's a fairly simple solution I hadn't thought about!
My guess is though, the screens won’t make a big difference probably 20-50W. At least my “old” 1080p screen was using this much.
@vsaw True, true. And what I'm really trying to capture is the power consumption differences between operating systems, form factors, and eventually proprietary vs open-source software.
@killyourfm Oh there is loads of fun to be had with this. A while back I found a research group looking into energy consumption of video streaming on Android. TLDR, 720p cuts it down in half compared to 1080p https://s2group.cs.vu.nl/2022-01-05-green-lab-experiment/
@killyourfm Here are some people and organizations you could check out if you want to learn more about energy efficient software
the software and sustainability research group https://s2group.cs.vu.nl/
https://www.thegreenwebfoundation.org/ which build the awesome CO2.js library
@fershad who works for the green web foundation and has a CO2 aware homepage
https://www.blauer-engel.de/en/productworld/resources-and-energy-efficient-software-products a German certificate. Super cool fact: the first software to get the certificate is #KDE #Okular
@vsaw @fershad
Some context around that super cool fact: I watched Joseph's presentation (from KDE) at LAS last weekend about their Blue Angel certification and software sustainability -- that is precisely what inspired me to start this testing!
(I'll also be seeking the same certification for Thunderbird)
@killyourfm Fedora Linux with which desktop environment, though? Gnome and KDE are known resource hogs compared to XFCE and others for instance. Or is this part of the software analysis that will follow?
@lminiero So, in 2019 I published this: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonevangelho/2019/05/06/benchmarked-the-most-power-efficient-ubuntu-19-04-flavor-will-surprise-you/
The takeaway was that GNOME had a very similar power envelope compared to Xfce (surprising, yes) and KDE was indeed pretty power hungry.
MATE was the most power efficient at the time. I am VERY much looking forward to revisiting these tests with better tools and a few years of optimizations in the rearview mirror.
@lminiero To answer your question directly: the flagship, which would be GNOME.
@killyourfm I love what you're trying to do!
How are you collecting the data? Keep in touch, I'm interested at doing something with it
@baldpolnareffart Right now I'm just throwing notes and results in Joplin. Not very organized yet. But I would like to make all this public, and have other people running similar tests.
@killyourfm I think before collecting data from various different people, we should try to organise some sort of guideline to follow, just to make sure everyone who's involved is on the same page.
We could start collecting individual data and try to look for interesting patterns before asking the community to submit anything
@baldpolnareffart I'd prefer looking to your for guidance on methodology. Let's take this to email!
An established methodology is one of the benefits of the Blue Angel ecolabel award criteria. We document the process in the KDE Eco handbook:
See these publications for information about the methodology.
"Sustainable software products -- Towards assessment criteria for resource and energy efficiency" (Sec 4.1)
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.future.2018.02.044
And this German Environmental Agency report, pp. 22-27 summary in English:
https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/publikationen/entwicklung-anwendung-von-bewertungsgrundlagen-fuer
@be4foss @killyourfm That was gold, thank you!
@baldpolnareffart @be4foss Indeed, that handbook is a great resource.
And I think the Expert Power Control 1202 might be JUST A BIT more useful than my Kill-A-Watt :D
@killyourfm that's a really cool project! I started a small tool to gather this kind of data (https://github.com/lutris/hardmon) but it's for CPU and GPU only. What do you use to measure power consumption from the wall? I have some smart plug which might do the trick
@killyourfm would be worthy to note that your low (288W for Dirt 5 at 1440p) would pretty much be my high. I measured around 210W max from a 5700XT and 80W max from a Ryzen 5 2600. 4k gaming has a much heavier impact on power consumption than 120Hz gaming. I haven't tried 4k gaming, but with FSR and DLSS it may no longer be necessary to render at such high resolutions?
@mathieucomandon And now you have my brain working overtime.
What would the power savings of DLSS & FSR look like when applied to millions of games? Damn....
@killyourfm on some games they are already enabled by default. FSR is pretty much what makes a game like Dead island 2 playable on a Steam Deck. The whole portable gaming PC trend might help getting games that are less power hungry by default. On the other hand, I can't wait to see what UE5 games look like... That will step up the power hunger...
@mathieucomandon hardmon looks really useful! After all, CPU and GPU are going to drive the majority of power usage.
Does it depend on the machine having various system sensors available? (For background, I use to use Phoronix Test Suite for stuff like this, but yours gets straight to the point and would probably be a better option for me).
@killyourfm I've tried to avoid any dependency and keep the whole thing as a single file so it's easy to run on any machine that has python. It does require root where mangohud does not but mangohud hasn't been able to report the CPU power.
You can follow Engineer Detlef Thoms, who does relevant back-of-the-envelope calculations in the "Sustainable Programming" course (see 04:20–06:10).
Calculate the energy savings, make certain assumptions about use (e.g., how often the savings apply), and multiply out. Given the global nature of software, the numbers scale up very quickly.
https://open.hpi.de/courses/cleanit2021/items/5DHsS3tJsXAqfUE4q4F82Z
*Furiously scribbles notes*
@killyourfm
We really need a variable refresh rate. There is no point to stay at 120Hz all the time.
We could use a lower refresh rate while typing and only bump it before playing animations.
@Zelfir Agreed! This is something iOS and Android are already doing, right?
@killyourfm Yes but AFAIK we don't have this yet on desktop Linux environments.
@Zelfir @killyourfm exactly what I was going to suggest! An “Eco Mode” in settings that could run the desktop at 60 hz, but all the refresh rates a monitor supports can be working an available in game settings. I would like one that goes even further and does a 30 fps refresh rate. It may sound silly, but it would be nice for battery powered devices when trying to conserve as much as they can on battery. Or for kiosk usage.