Intel Fixes Arc GPUs' High Dual-Monitor Power Consumption, 3+ Monitors Still a Problem

Multi-display configurations are used by many people in the small office/home office space (SOHO) these days. Intel's moderately-priced Arc A770 graphics cards would be a good fit for these setups if they did not consume 40W of power in idle mode when driving two or more monitors. Apparently, the latest drivers fix the issue and cut down power consumption by four times, reports VideoCardz. But there is a catch. 

Driving several displays at once requires powering up the appropriate number of display pipelines that consume energy. Also, sending high-resolution images with deep colors to monitors requires transferring loads of data and this means power. But in idle mode GPUs don't need to send 60 or 120 high-resolution deep color images per second to displays, which is something that Intel's Arc-based graphics cards did (and competing products from AMD and Nvidia do not). 

Apparently, Intel's latest driver version 31.0.101.4146 has the fix for this issue for at least some dual-display setups, according to Intel Community Github. There is still one bump though: it only works for dual-monitor configurations and does not seem work for systems with three or more screens. 

Driver issues are arguably the main thing that has plagued Intel's Arc discrete graphics cards for desktops since their launch. The good news is that the latest drivers reduce power consumption of dual-display setups almost to the levels of configurations with one monitor. The company also recently released drivers that improve performance in DX9 games.