Shouldn't Vertical Synchronization Reduce Power Usage? Intel Disagrees.

[Alexko]

I wanted to reduce the power usage of a game, so I figured I'd ask Intel's Graphics Command Center to always enable VSync for it. Yet the tool tells me that this actually increases power usage versus letting the application control it. I thought maybe this had something to do with driver overhead, but the tool also says that forcibly disabling VSync decreases power usage, which is also counterintuitive, as both disabling VSync and adding driver overhead should increase power usage.

Shouldn't VSync reduce the framerate and decrease power usage? After all, AMD does something similar to save power: https://www.amd.com/en/technologies/frtc
I think NVIDIA has a similar feature.

Am I missing something? Or did the Intel devs get things mixed up?

Sorry to make a whole thread for something so small, but I couldn't think of another place to post it.

 

[Putas]

Yes, frame rate limiters should decrease consumption.

 

[Globalisateur]

I don't know about vsync, but adaptive vsync (like freesync) was actually designed to reduce power consumption of laptops.

 

[Alexko]

Thanks, happy to confirm I'm not crazy!

I guess either Intel's iGPUs behave very strangely, or there's a mistake in the Command Center.

 

[glow]

I don't know about vsync, but adaptive vsync (like freesync) was actually designed to reduce power consumption of laptops.

Well, sort of. The original tech that was leveraged into that, was designed for slower refreshes, mostly for static images over eDP (e.g, ~1Hz or less). It would power down the PHYs (saving power) while spinning up a buffer and some logic (consuming power) to "replay" the last received buffer to the display. Adaptive Sync doesn't really have the power saving advantages of gating the high speed PHYs.

 

[Infinisearch]

My take on the possibility.
CPU frame rate limiter or limitations.
GPU frame rate limitations.
Non exactness of frame time on CPU and/or GPU.

If CPU frame time hovers around a fixed unit close to the monitor refresh (and at least double buffer) and the GPU can basically keep pace, then if you enable vsync wouldn't modern GPU's try to boost more to maintain the GPU frame rate? This would use more power comparatively to vsync being turned off in this and similar cases.