Radeon Software Adrenalin 21.4.1 WHQL drivers greatly improves power consumption in certain states

AMD recently released the Radeon Software Adrenalin 21.4.1 WHQL driver. I believe that many users of AMD graphics cards have updated it. In the update log of AMD’s new driver, there may be some changes that are not mentioned.

In the week, after the new driver was released, TechPowerup conducted related tests and found that after using the Radeon Software Adrenalin 21.4.1 WHQL driver, the power consumption of the Navi 21-core graphics card under certain conditions has drastically decreased. Compared with the March Radeon Software Adrenalin 21.3.2 driver, Radeon RX 6800/RX 6800 XT/RX 6900 XT at a resolution of 1440P, the idle power consumption dropped from 25W to 5W, a decrease of 72%. At the same time, there was a 30% drop in media playback, from 50W to 35W. This can be said to be a huge improvement, not only reducing power consumption but also reducing heat and noise.

Compared with its own, Radeon RX 6800/RX 6800 XT/RX 6900 XT does have a significant decline but compared with NVIDIA products, such power consumption is still relatively high. For example, during media playback, the power consumption of GeForce RTX 3070 is 18W, while the power consumption of GeForce RTX 3080 is 27W.

TechPowerup also tested the Radeon RX 5700 XT and found no changes, while the Radeon RX 6700 XT did not change much. Therefore, it is possible that the Navi 22 core itself has been optimized at the beginning of the release, so the effect in this update is not obvious. Probably after the release of Radeon RX 6700 XT after a period of stable operation, it has been recognized by AMD, so these optimization measures are also applied to the Navi 21 core through the new driver.

Probably AMD also forgot, so in the update log of the Radeon Software Adrenalin 21.4.1 WHQL driver, these contents were not added.