Energy consumption and efficiency:
At last, we 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, as 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 store. This will enable us to measure the overall power consumption of the graphics card under test in a totally independent way. Here’s a series of photos of our Benchlab installation, to which we’ll devote 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 obtain the total power consumption, we’ll record the 12VHPWR Power consumption, which corresponds to the card’s power supply 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 consumption in the Cyberpunk 2077 game in 4K rasterization with 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 ROG Astral LC RTX 5090 literally explodes. We knew that on paper, NVIDIA had announced a TDP(Thermal Design Power) of 600 watts for this new model, compared with 450 watts for the RTX 4090, an increase of 33.3%. In our readings, we actually have our RTX 5090, whose average consumption in 4K rasterization is 594.13 watts, compared with 417.39 watts for the RTX 4090.
It’s hard not to make a direct shortcut between the 32% increase in rasterization performance and this increase in power consumption. Unfortunately, with the same engraving proces, it was necessary to increase power consumption in order to increase performance. We’ve already seen this with CPUs. The good news is the reduction in power consumption when upscaling and NVIDIA’s various technologies are activated. This brings us down to 491.4 watts, which is logical, but something AMD is unable to achieve.
As a reminder, NVIDIA recommends a power supply of 1000 watts with an RTX 5090, and during this test we recorded an average of 785 watts for our entire configuration, peaking at 889 watts. The recommendations are therefore entirely logical.
