One of the biggest technological leaps in the world of graphics cards and video games has been real-time ray tracing, commonly known as Ray Tracing . But in the shade, another technology sets the difference against the competition in terms of visual quality and performance. We are talking of course about DLSS and DLSS 2.0 , which we already knew thoroughly and tested in different articles, but what if, in addition to increasing performance, the consumption of the GPU decreased? it’s possible?
The comparisons always focus precisely on comparing the performance of this type of technology in terms of FPS. Others of us take it quite a bit further by adding data from Frame Time, Frame Rate, 0.1% and 1% Low or comparative stuttering variability, which is very interesting because it allows us to have a better concept of how it works and where its benefits are.
Today we are going to go a step further and we are going to measure another setting that we often do not take into account in our day to day: consumption.
DLSS, simple Super Sampling or does it go much further?
The test that we are going to show has been repeated with other games like Control, where history repeats itself, but as always and being our bulwark of tests, we have once again chosen Shadow of the Tomb Raider to compare.
The test equipment remains the same, so the results can be extrapolated to the rest of the articles, which is composed of:
- i7-8700K (Stock)
- ASUS Maximus X Formula
- ASUS STRIX RTX 2060 O6G
- Corsair Vengeance RGB 3200 MHz C16 2 x 8 GB
- Corsair AX1200i
- ASUS Helios
- Corsair MP510 960 GB
- ASUS Ryujin 240
- EK Vardar EVO RGB x 7
What are we looking for in this particular test? Check how DLSS affects various scenarios other than consumption. Therefore, we have taken four different samples:
- Normal configuration without limits and without DLSS.
- Normal configuration without limits and with DLSS.
- FPS limitation to 30 without DLSS.
- FPS limitation to 30 with DLSS .
Therefore, it will be interesting to see how this technology influences the consumption of the GPU and therefore its temperature, since we know that it boosts the performance of the graphics card quite a bit. Will the GPU consume more? Less or maybe exactly the same?
DLSS and its consumption, something replicable in many other games
SOTTR was set to a native 4K resolution with Very High preset, without Ray Tracing and with an exclusive screen under DX12. As can be seen in the shots, when we do not limit the FPS, that is, when we let the GPU work freely, we see that the difference between activating DLSS and not activating it in terms of consumption is really very even.
To get a more approximate idea, the performance has risen on average by 35% , while the average consumption in both outlets has been 182 vs 181 watts , that is, there is a variability of consumption of only 0.54%, something totally negligible and outside even the minimum error range.
But everything changes when we limit the FPS to 30, since the figures change radically. Logically, as we are around an average of about 47 FPS with DLSS and about 34 FPS without it active, the fact of limiting the FPS to 30 means that in certain scenes of the game the GPU is very much in excess and therefore the consumption falls, while in others scenes this is kept at levels close to the rest without said limitation.
But when in addition to applying the limit to 30 FPS we activate DLSS, what we find is that the consumption falls dramatically. To be specific, with the limitation without DLSS we get an average of 146 watts , but when we activate it the figure drops to only 83 , that is, almost half and more than half without FPS limitations.
The temperature does the same by lowering 11 degrees! , so we have not lost FPS, we have gained visual quality, consumption is almost half and the temperature of the GPU is much lower. This applied to a much higher Frame Limit where the GPU works without problems will mean less use of light, force less the graphics card, have less noise and not lose performance, something very useful for example with G-SYNC screens, where you have to activate vertical sync in the NVIDIA control panel and we will be limited to the maximum frequency of the monitor to enjoy this technology.
