VRR Enabled AMD Radeon RX 6000/7000 GPUs Reduce Idle Power Consumption by 81%

People from ComputerBase have benchmarked AMD Radeon RX 6000 and RX 700 series GPUs based on RDNA 2 and RDNA 3 GPU architectures. These were power consumption benchmarks rather than typical performance measurements. Their most recent findings show that setting Variable Refresh Rate (VRR) helps reduce AMD Radeon cards’ idle power usage. ComputerBase benchmarked Radeon RX 6800/6700 XT and RX 7900 XT, last-generation and current-generation graphics cards, using a 4K display with a 144 Hz frame rate. The performance matrix also features a contrast between the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 Ti, RTX 3080, and RTX 4080 with the Intel Arc A770.

Regarding performance metrics, the tests compare YouTube with SDR at 60 FPS and YouTube with HDR at 60 FPS while using a 4K 144 Hz monitor setup. They also compare desktop idle usage, dual monitor power consumption, window movement, and YouTube with SDR at 60 FPS. The comparison is seen here, with the Radeon RX 7900 XTX utilizing 81% less power in single monitor mode and 71% less power in dual monitor mode as the most notable power consumption regression.