AMD’s Latest Adrenalin Drivers Reduce High Power Consumption During YouTube Playback for Some Radeon RX 6000 Series Graphics Cards

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Image: AMD

AMD Radeon RX 6000 Series graphics cards owners who have been experiencing a relatively disturbing level of power usage when watching YouTube content will definitely want to grab red team’s latest Adrenalin release if they haven’t already.

As indicated in new benchmarks shared by ComputerBase, it appears that AMD’s newest driver package is helpful in reducing the power consumption of select Radeon RX 6000 Series models when playing back certain types of content on YouTube. One of the bigger differences lies with the playback of 4K 60 FPS content; the Radeon RX 6700 XT seems to benefit from drops of 30 to 18 watts, while Radeon RX 6900 XT users should see drops from 42 to 30 watts. None of these improvements seem to apply when HDR is enabled, however.

Additionally, AMD’s latest Radeon drivers don’t seem to reduce power consumption in instances where Radeon RX 6000 Series graphics cards are being used to drive a multi-monitor setup in 4K resolution. This is something that AMD users have been voicing their concerns about, but the Radeon RX 6600 XT appears to be the only RDNA 2 GPU that manages to consume less than 33 watts when used to drive these kinds of setups.

What prompted the tests was the release of AMD’s latest RDNA 2 graphics card, the Radeon RX 6600 XT. The initial assumption was that these GPUs were simply less power hungry than its siblings, but it turns out that the differences are largely owed to the improvements that AMD introduced as part of its latest driver package.

AMD’s Radeon RX 6600 XT graphics card went on sale this week. It features 32 Compute Units, 8 GB of GDDR6 memory on a 128-bit memory interface, a game/boost clock of 2,359/2,589 MHz, and 32 MB of Infinity Cache. The TBP is 160 watts.

Image: ComputerBase
Image: ComputerBase

The Radeon RX 6800 XT with the Adrenalin 21.8.1 with two UHD monitors with 60 Hz still needs a very high 41 watts, with the launch driver from November 2020 it is even 2 watts less. The Radeon RX 6700 XT, Radeon RX 6800 and Radeon RX 6900 XT also showed no improvements.

Source: ComputerBase (via VideoCardz)

Tsing Mui
News poster at The FPS Review.

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