Last week, when AMD released the Radeon Software Adrenalin 21.4.1, the patch notes included a slew of upgrades, features, and optimisations, but as it turns out, there was another sneaky improvement that we weren’t told about. Reportedly, the new driver also improves GPU power consumption, reducing it by as much as 72% in non-gaming workloads. 

The team at TechPowerUp tested the whole Radeon RX 6000 series GPU line-up, which consists of the Radeon RX 6700 XT, the RX 6800, the RX 6800 XT, and the RX 6900 XT. They’ve run tests running both the 21.3.2 driver and the 21.4.1 driver in various scenarios, including when the GPU is idle, in a multi-monitor setup, and during media playback.

Image credit: TechPowerUp

While idling, the RX 6800, RX 6800 XT and RX 6900 XT graphics cards saw power consumption reduced by up to 72 percent. In multi-monitor setups, there is also a slight difference, although it could be within the margin of error. As for media playback, these three GPUs had power consumption reduced by up to 20W. Interestingly, these power consumption improvements already seemed to be in place for the RX 6700 XT, which didn’t change much between the two driver versions.

It’s unclear why AMD didn’t announce these improvements with the patch notes.

KitGuru says: While it is odd that we didn’t hear about this when the new driver was announced, these are still welcome optimisations. Do you own an RX 6000 series graphics card? Have you noticed any differences in power consumption since updating to the latest driver? 

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