AMD recently released the new Radeon Software Adrenalin 21.4.1 WHQL driver, which is packed with new features. However, the company did not indicate that the new software also significantly reduces the power consumption of the Radeon RX 6000 series graphics cards in some non-gaming tasks.

This was discovered by TechPowerUp, which conducted its own testing and compared the power consumption of the Radeon RX 6800, Radeon RX 6800 XT, and Radeon RX 6900 XT video cards with the old driver version 21.3.2 and the new 21.4.1. For example, a noticeable decrease in the power consumption of the Radeon RX 6800, Radeon RX 6800 XT, and Radeon RX 6900 XT models in idle mode turned out to be. At a desktop resolution of 1440p, these cards only draw about 8W of power instead of the 28W they used to. Decrease by more than 70% or 3.5 times. Also, the power consumption of these models when working with media content has been reduced by 30%. Unfortunately, in both cases, no significant changes were found for the Radeon RX 6700 XT model.

Why AMD did not indicate such improvements for the older models of the Radeon RX 6000 series of video cards is a mystery. However, according to TechPowerUp, there is still an indirect explanation for this. Even considering the power consumption level of Radeon video cards reduced from about 50 to> 35 W, when working with media content, they still require more power than Ampere video cards from NVIDIA. For example, the GeForce RTX 3070 models need 18 watts for the same tasks, and the GeForce RTX 3080 models need 27 watts.

The resource also tested the power consumption of the old model Radeon RX 5700 XT but found no changes. AMD did not change the power plan of the Radeon RX 6700 XT model either. This graphics accelerator already has a low power consumption relative to its older brothers in the series.