NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 Founders Edition Review: Between Value and Decadence - When Price is Not Everything | Page 15

In order to be able to assess the efficiency really cleanly, I also measured the power consumption in detail for each individual benchmark, whose results we already know, which we could also see in detail on the previous page. But what can we expect if we now relate the two values meaningfully to each other? How many watts of power consumption does a single frame per second cost me (more or less)? The realization is quite astonishing. You can now add this up for all games and show a cumulative result:

Games like Horizon Zero Dawn and Wolfenstein Youngblood, which scale well with the new amp cascades, are the best indicator of how things are going in Ultra-HD, when they are going. I only included World War Z as a game because it guarantees the CPU limit in any case. And exactly then, but only then, the GeForce RTX is unfortunately amply punished. It’s like being in second gear and driving 50 at 50 km/h through the city. Cheers to the tank or battery! It’s not the card’s fault. That’s why everything again game after game:

Save energy with DLSS? That works!

Let’s do a little experiment. In the gallery above at Ultra-HD you can post Wolfenstein Youngblood. Now let’s compare this with the values I could measure for Ultra-HD but with DLSS. While the GeForce RTX 3080 without DLSS still had 2.35 watts per FPS that had to be expended, it’s now only 1.84 watts, so only 78.3%. This gain is of course not due to a decreasing power consumption at identical FPS, but rather to the increased graphics performance at almost the same power consumption.

Corresponding articles I have already published show, however, that by using a suitable limiter you can reverse exactly this effect in the direction of power consumption. if you limit the run with DLSS to the FPS number without DLSS, the power consumption drops by almost 20%.