With the Radeon RX 7900 and most recently the RX 7600, AMD caught up with Nvidia’s corresponding GeForce graphics cards in terms of performance. The engineers of the so-called “Team Red” wrote a special focus on energy efficiency in the specifications. For a long time, however, the idle power consumption was the problem. That should be the new driver with the long name Radeon Software Adrenaline Edition 23.7.1 now at least improve – AMD itself does not speak of fixing it.
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Nemesis HRR displays
It is true that Radeon graphics cards have been able to implement their energy-saving functions well on simple Full HD screens for many years, and both the graphics chip and the GDDR6 memory that is common today are clocked way down. In our test, the Radeon RX 7600 achieved a very good 6 watts when idling on a 1080p60 screen, i.e. Full HD resolution with 60 frames per second.
However, if we connected a gamer display with a 4K resolution and 120 or more, the power consumption rose to 29 watts. A Sapphire Pulse Radeon RX 7900 XT even managed 73 watts – for doing nothing, mind you. No 3D application was running, no open browser with wriggling applications in the background, just the pure Windows 11 desktop. This is clearly too much and could be done better, as not only Nvidia’s GeForce cards show. It also discouraged some energy-conscious prospects from buying.
With the new driver 23.7.1, AMD finally wants to have addressed the problem along with other bug fixes. The Release Notes report improvements in idle power consumption on certain 4K144 freesync displays. (“Improvements to high idle power when using select 4k@144Hz FreeSync enabled displays or multimonitor display configurations (such as 4k@144HZ or 4k@120Hz + 1440p@60Hz display) using on Radeon™ RX 7000 series GPUs.“).
The first reports on the net still give a mixed picture: Some of the power consumption dropped from 40 or more watts to 10 watts. If this is confirmed, that would be a very good value for a high-end graphics card. But others report that nothing has changed for them. Most rely on the display of monitoring tools such as GPU-z or HWInfo.
We will soon remeasure one or the other Radeon RX and Radeon Pro card in the c’t lab and also update this message with the results.
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Until then, the new driver is definitely worth a try, as it also brings other improvements, as usual. Problems with AV1 playback in DaVinci Resolve Studio should be fixed and the game Nioh 2 should no longer crash on the Radeon RX 6800 XT.
(csp)