AMD Adrenalin Edition 22.12.2 Driver Slashes RX 7900 XT(X) Power Consumption
AMD has released a second driver supporting the new Radeon RX 7900 XT and XTX graphics cards. Adrenaline Edition 22.12.2 WHQL is a dedicated driver for the RDNA 3 GPU series, and its headline quality is that it can significantly reduce power usage when using the GPU to accelerate video decoding. Elsewhere in the driver, there are some system and game fixes, but no new features seem to have been added.
Many tech sites and hobbyists have noticed that the new RX 7900 family GPUs consume a surprising amount of power when decoding video, idling multi-monitor setups, or moving desktop windows.Germany’s computer based One of those quirky power issues to shine a light on, the RDNA 3 GPUs deliver significantly more power during these tasks than the RX 6000 series graphics cards (which use the RDNA 2 GPU architecture). commented that it consumed
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The two charts from ComputerBase above highlight that the RX 7900 XT(X) is truly an outlier in terms of video playback efficiency. When playing a 4K, 60fps video on YouTube, these newer Radeons can consume 70 or 80W. That’s more than double his power draw, which you’d reasonably expect if you looked at its predecessors and competitors. The new RDNA 3 graphics card’s 4K 60fps HDR video playback power consumption figures were still high, but far more similar to those of its predecessors and rivals. We plan to target the Video Codec Engine (VCE) to fix this video playback power consumption issue.
AMD has not finished tuning the power consumption of the RX 7900 XT(X). The release notes for driver 22.12.2 state that “Higher idle power was observed in some circumstances when using some high resolution and high refresh rate displays”, which is Remains a known issue. According to AMD, future driver updates will bring further power efficiency improvements.
The new driver for the Radeon RX 7900 XT(X) graphics card also fixes the following issues:
- Corruption may occur when using Virtual Super-Resolution in multi-display configurations.
- Changing display modes in a four display configuration may cause a system crash.
- While loading Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales, an app crash or driver timeout may occur after enabling Ray Tracing settings.
We will be doing more testing of the Radeon RX 7900 XT(X) graphics card soon. So stay tuned for observations of graphics editors with the latest drivers.
If you own a Radeon graphics card other than the RX 7900 XT(X), the latest Adrenalin driver version at the time of writing is 22.11.2.
