Use a GeForce RTX 4090 while consuming almost half as much? It’s possible !

If you have followed our tests and the news of the new generation of Ada Lovelace graphics cards from Nvidia – the GeForce RTX 40 – you will no doubt know that their energy consumption is a real abyss, the RTX 4090 in the lead with its TGP (envelope thermal) of 450 W. This increase in consumption has allowed Nvidia to assert itself as the market leader in terms of performance, with a GPU capable of running any title in 4K, all with a framerate (rate of frames per second) high, especially with the all-new DLSS 3.

But at a time of energy sobriety, when efforts should focus on efficiency in terms of consumption of this type of product, this choice may seem quite questionable. A team from the Korean site Quasar Zone therefore tried to reduce the consumption of the RTX 4090 as much as possible by using two methods well known to gamers: either by simply limiting the maximum power of the GPU, or by using undervolting. This manual tweaking technique using dedicated software consists of lowering the voltage delivered to the GPU, and therefore reducing its overall consumption, at the cost of reduced performance.

Significantly lower fuel consumption…

FYI, during our tests of the RTX 4090 on a panel of varied games, we noted an average consumption of 431 W in raytracing, quite close to the TGP of 450 W therefore, and around 385 W without. The Quasar Zone testers had an average consumption a little lower than ours (347 W) on five recent AAA games, and were able to obtain very convincing results by reducing the maximum power available: at 80% of the limit, they noted just 1% less performance and at 60% – or 70 W less – the loss was only 6%.

… and a few i/s less

By undervolting the card, they managed to go even further since a voltage of 850 mV and a frequency of 2460 MHz reduced the energy consumption to only 232 W (more than 100 W less!), with reduced performance by 7.6%. To give concrete figures, that would mean Call of Duty Black OPS Cold War from 144 fps to 132 fps or cyber punk from 42 fps to 39 fps (according to our results in 4K games, without raytracing and without DLSS), a completely acceptable loss that would hardly impact the gaming experience.

For owners of this very high-end graphics card, it is therefore possible to slightly reduce its energy impact and reduce its electricity bill somewhat. But experience also proves that Nvidia could have better optimized its GPU without seeking performance at all costs. This would undoubtedly have allowed many users not to change the power supply of their PC or their cooling system, perhaps even avoiding problems with connectors that melt…