AMD Appears To Have Power-Saving 'Dynamic Frame Rate Control' Feature Incoming
Looks like we'll soon be seeing a new power saving feature from AMD.
3DCenter.org, a German source, posted an article stating that AMD is working on a new feature in its Catalyst driver called Dynamic Frame Rate Control. They got this information from one of the forum users, who appears to be an AMD employee.
"Earlier this week I got to play with our new Dynamic Frame Rate Control feature in a (coming soon) version of Catalyst and it was AWESOME. Being able to limit your FPS to 60fps on a game where it doesn't matter too much if you're able to get 150FPS. The power savings were mind blowing," posted user AMD-Chris.
Naturally, we checked in with somebody close to AMD. Our source seems to believe that DFRC will indeed help with power savings, therefore also reducing heat and noise output. It therefore seems like a power saving feature.
The feature will likely have a slider to adjust the target frame rate. Add all this information together, and it's clear that DFRC is an extension of the AMD PowerTune feature, which dynamically adjusts the GPU frequency to match temperature, fan speed and power consumption targets.
Say you have a game that runs at 150 FPS under normal circumstances, but you have only a 60 Hz screen; you'll be wasting a lot of these generated frames. Therefore, setting the framerate target to 60 FPS would allow the GPU to run at much lower frequencies, saving power and reducing the heat output.
You may wonder what the point is at 60 Hz because you can just enable V-Sync, but you'd be surprised. Enabling V-Sync doesn't actually make the GPU scale its frequency to what's necessary to achieve 60 FPS, meaning you don't get all of the power savings.
AMD-Chris mentioned that the feature was "coming soon." Funny, you'd expect that this feature would have been included with the Catalyst Omega driver release last week.
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Niels Broekhuijsen is a Contributing Writer for Tom's Hardware US. He reviews cases, water cooling and pc builds.
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tomfreak FINALLY they listened! an "Nvidia" equivalent(not exactly, may be better) of adaptive VsyncReply
I have been asking for this RadeonPro feature via from FB, to forum AMD representatives with no luck from replies. I was going to give up AMD to Nvidia.
Thank god this news come b4 I switch. I hope this news is real or I am going to switch to Nvidia. -
MaCk0y Is this the same as limiting the frame rate using MSI afterburner, Dxtory or RadeonPro ?Reply -
Vlad Rose I'm surprised that this hasn't been done a long time ago.Reply
BTW, this is nothing like Nvidia's adaptive Vsync as it doesn't automatically adjust the clock rates of the card based on frame rate like this AMD driver does. -
AJSB tomfreak,Reply
This have nothing to do with Adaptive VSync.
dimar,
Yeah, i also expect this feature not be only for GCN cards.
This feature is VERY interesting helping saving a lot of energy, reding noise, reduce overall temperatures of the system,etc. I'm very pleased with this feature, hope it works well.
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David Dewis At last. This is brilliant. I know most games have this feature built in now, but still for those that don't, this is good news.Reply -
red77star This is the most useless feature I heard of. Least thing I would do is to limit game to 60FPS just so I can save some useless power WTF is wrong with this world. No I want my game to run 15000000FPS if it's able to push it, because gaming on 30FPS is impossible, 60FPS sort of sucks 60FPS + awesome. My suggestion is to disable any type of power saving including useless junk called ULPS.Reply