AMD Confirms That SmartShift Tech Only Shipping in One Laptop For 2020

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• Dragonstongue - Friday, June 5, 2020 - link

  be nice of their (GPU in general) would detect the program and adjust power with performance for overall power use, something that is far from ideal at this moment in time.. Imagine how much worldwide power would be saved (as well as wallets) if a high performance GPU would downclock from say 1800Mhz to 500Mhz (or less) yet still have the full performance expected.. granted this would only work with older games/apps
  
  example Diablo 3, no way in heck if you used todays mid to high end GPU it NEEDS to run full clocks, that wastes a bunch of power for nothing (not to mention, produces lots of waste heat)
  
  on that note, would be excellent if we the user could easily set the low 2d (idle basically) 3d and high 3d clocks overall, where the person whom likes to tinker is able to with a few clicks do such things.
  
  That smartshift, sounds exactly what PS5 will be doing.. odd this has not been done for years now, things like Optimus on paper are great, real world has been not exactly great.
  
  hope works out for them overall, maybe will lead to even better things down the line for PC, Laptop, Mobile and so forth, as the many makers seem overall against having a very nice size battery (certainly against top notch cooling regardless of price) at least this in theory will save quite a bit of power overall being "intelligent" allocation of power budget to keep performance up but actual power used as low as possible as often as possible .. to me, that is what it should be.
  
  you know, to save them 4 cell batteries and all that LOL

• Phartindust - Friday, June 5, 2020 - link

  Have you tried Radeon Chill? You are able to set max frame rate with it which reduces power usage as you suggest.

• yeeeeman - Saturday, June 6, 2020 - link

  That is not the point here. The idea is to maximize frame rates by shifting the power to the unit it needs it more. Say a game uses the CPU a lot, but the you not so much and because the default split of power is more to the GPU and less to the CPU, you will get bad performance. But this tech can detect this scenario and shift the power balance to cpu. You get better perf and the power usage is the same

• yeeeeman - Saturday, June 6, 2020 - link

  But the CPU not so much*

• deil - Monday, June 8, 2020 - link

  Radeon Chill feature is great thing for gaming laptop. I set 30 fps and have 50'C on both or I can switch to 45 fps and have comfortable ~60.
  Problem with laptop is that 130 FPS that my laptop can do in games I play, comes with hefty price of literally burning fingers. (I have dell g5 older setup)
  
  but I think what Dragonstongue meant that you can get 60 fps in 2 ways.
  
  Craning up the horsepower of gpu to max, and then use utilize 30%
  or
  stay in second/third tier out of 5 (like my nvidia have 5 step boost ladder) of boost table and utilize 60-70% of gpu, while using 70% of the power envelope.
  the idea is that staying boosted very high for long time is still wasting power even if you idle.
  and If I've seen my GPU then it jumps only between 1/5/1/5/1/5 and usage is like 15w/40w/16w/42w
  nothing in between.

• whatthe123 - Saturday, June 6, 2020 - link

  Real world performance is generally poor for things like this because what you might consider "acceptable" speed would be considered unacceptable for another user. It's not exactly reasonable to expect a hardware company to tweak boost clock performance for every single game imaginable at a specific target framerate for every GPU spec. Best case you have a framerate cap and the software predicts frequencies required to hit that target, but even then power savings will be marginal as hardware utilization still plays the biggest role by far compared to clockspeed.
  
  What you're describing isn't what the PS5 is doing either. The PS5 has a limited power envelope (probably 100-150w) and will be shifting the power cap and boost clocks of the CPU and GPU on the fly. They're not planning on having significant downclocks to reduce the power envelope. They claim their biggest savings will be from being able to maintain a suspend state at .5w

• alufan - Sunday, June 7, 2020 - link

  I think most modern GPUs from either side do that if I Play an older game such as UT04 even at max everything the fans on my AMD aircooled GPUs dont even come on as the GPU is not working enough to raise the temp above 48degc my liquid cooled pcs dont even rise more than a deg or so no matter how long it plays and I have both brands doing the same even an aircooled living room pc in an itx case with a Ryzen 3600 and a 5700 stays silent

• DillholeMcRib - Monday, June 8, 2020 - link

  Do you know what punctuation is?

• zodiacfml - Sunday, June 7, 2020 - link

  You don't know what you're talking about. To help you a bit, GPUs don't use all the graphics power when it is not required, like a framerate cap or vsync when the system reaches it. I play Diablo 3 in 4K with a Vega 56 at 60Hz display, shows using 70-80 watts. Witcher 3, GPU uses all the power it can.

• alufan - Sunday, June 7, 2020 - link

  hmmm so you just repeated what I said?
  
  And I dont know what am talking about numpty