Although NVIDIA claims that the TGP of the
RTX 4090 graphics card is 450W, in fact, the average power consumption of the card is only about 350W when it is fully loaded. In addition to the higher power consumption of those overclocked versions, overall the energy consumption ratio of the graphics card is still good, but there is still room for further optimization.
The operation of optimizing the power consumption of the graphics card is nothing more than limiting the TGP and reducing the core voltage of the GPU. Quasarzone did this test. The specific operation is nothing more than using Afterburner to limit the TGP of the graphics card. Of course, the method of reducing the voltage is a bit complicated. Quasarzone uses an NVIDIA RTX 4090 Founder Edition graphics card, other accessories are a Core i9-13900K processor, ASUS ROG MAXIUS Z790 EXTREME, OLOy Blade RGB DDR-5-6800 16GB*2 memory.
They used five games to test the performance of the RTX 4090 in the case of reduced TGP and reduced pressure, including Cyberpunk 2077, Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered, Forza Horizon 5, Lost Ark, and PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, all games were run at 4K resolution and maximum quality, recording average frame rates and 1% low frame rates.
The average power consumption of this graphics card is 347W in the default setting, and the effect of reducing the voltage is the best after testing. If the maximum voltage is limited to 1000mV, the performance is even better than the default, but the power consumption is reduced to 323W. If it is limited to 950mV, the performance is slightly reduced by 1.2%, but the power consumption is reduced to 289W. If the voltage is further reduced, the performance drop is a bit large, and the effect of simply limiting the TGP of the graphics card is not so good, but it can also increase the energy consumption ratio of the graphics card.
If it is made into a graph, it is as shown in the above picture, but it is much simpler to limit the TGP of the graphics card in actual operation. Just use Afterburner to pull the power limit slider. If you want to lower the voltage, you need to adjust the frequency and voltage curve of the graphics card. In fact, both methods can effectively reduce the power consumption of the graphics card, and the performance decline is not large. The most extreme operating performance drops by 8%, but the power consumption of the graphics card is 110W lower than the default, which reduces the pressure on the power supply and heat dissipation a lot.
