Energy consumption and efficiency:
We finally have the means to effectively monitor the power consumption of our graphics cards thanks to the Benchlab telemetry system. We’ll now be able to carry out a complete analysis of our graphics card’s total power consumption via the dedicated 3 x PCIe and 2 x 12VHPWR power cables. But that’s not all, because we also need to be able to measure the power supplied via the PCIe slot. So we’re going to use a PCI-E PMD adapter from the ElmorLabs shop. This will give us the overall power consumption of the graphics card under test, completely independently. Here’s a series of photos of our Benchlab installation, to which we’ll be devoting a dedicated test in a few weeks’ time.
These various readings will be taken via Benchlab’s dedicated application. The photos below were taken with the NVIDIA RTX 4060 Ti 8 GB FE graphics card to illustrate our power consumption readings.
To get the total power consumption, we’ll read the 12VHPWR Power consumption, which corresponds to the supply to the card via its 16-pin mini-connectors, and the EPS1 reading, which supplies the adapter. We export the readings, which are taken every 500 ms, and calculate the average power consumption in the Cyberpunk 2077 game in 4K rasterisation with the graphics options in Ultra and in 4K with ray tracing in Ultra, DLSS Performance x2 and path tracing.
Power consumption in Cyberpunk 2077 :
As you can see, the power consumption of our NVIDIA RTX 5090 Founders Edition literally explodes. We knew that on paper, NVIDIA announced a TDP(Thermal Design Power) of 575 watts for this new model compared with 450 watts for the RTX 4090, an increase of 27.7%. In our readings, we actually have our RTX 5090, whose average power consumption in 4K rasterisation is 558.99 watts, compared with 417.39 watts for the RTX 4090.
It’s hard not to make a direct shortcut with the 28.4% increase in rasterisation performance and this increase in power consumption. Unfortunately, with an identical engraving process, it was necessary to increase power consumption in order to increase performance. We’ve already seen this happen with CPUs. The good news is the reduction in power consumption when upscaling and the various NVIDIA technologies are activated. We’re down to 477.17 watts, which is logical but something AMD can’t achieve.
As a reminder, NVIDIA recommends a power supply of 1000 watts with an RTX 5090, and during this test we found an average of 775 watts for our entire configuration, with a peak of 856 watts. So the recommendations make perfect sense.
