The maximum reduction of 81% can significantly reduce the idle power consumption when VRR is enabled for the AMD graphics card.

CTOnews.com, August 3, according to a recent test conducted by German technology media Computerbase, the Radeon 6000 series based on RDNA 2 architecture and Radeon 7000 series video cards based on RDNA 3 architecture can significantly reduce idle power consumption after enabling variable refresh rate (VRR).

In order to more accurately measure the power consumption of graphics cards, the website also purchased Powenetics V2 power measurement equipment and tested it with 4K@60Hz on monitors that support the highest 144Hz refresh rate.

In addition to comparing the Radeon RX 6800 XT and RX 7900 XTX, this test also compares Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 Ti, RTX3080 and RTX 4080, as well as Intel Regent A770 graphics cards.

The test contents include idle power consumption, dual display power consumption, window movement, SDR YouTube of 60FPS and HDR YouTube video playback of 60FPS and so on.

Among them, the most obvious reduction in power consumption is the Radeon RX 7900 XTX graphics card, which is 104W in idle state when VRR is not enabled in 144Hz@4K state, and drops to 20W after enabling.

The power consumption is reduced by 81% in the single display setting, 71% in the dual display setting, and 36% in window movement.

Old GPU, such as Radeon RX 6800 XT, reduced idle power consumption by 79% after VRR was enabled.

CTOnews.com note: however, enabling VRR is only applicable to AMD graphics cards, but it is counterproductive to Intel and Nvidia graphics cards.

The flagship Arc A770 increases idle power consumption by 11% on a single monitor. For RTX 4080, idle power consumption has increased by 25%.