this post was submitted on 22 Dec 2023
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makes me wonder when people are going to start caring about the power draw from PC's and consoles.
I love gaming. Grew up gaming. Make my living working in the fringes of the game industry. And it makes me wonder when we're going to discuss the clock cycles in the room...
I take comfort that the coal rollers and assholes who fly 40 miles for nachos far outweigh any contributions my aging PC generates but I do worry in the aggregate: we're powering machines to generate heat to provide entertainment, and at some point that's going to come under examination.
Electricity isn't that expensive, especially if you have renewables. Stuff and transportation is. The biggest cause for co2 at the top is consumerism.
Remember that, once you have your electronics, the entertainment you get from it is competing against entertainment from physical things, or travel, or something else.
In addition, in winter that electricity is turned into heat, which you need anyway to heat up your home. And heating has always taken much more electricity than video games in my experience.
All things considered, video games are a fairly efficient form of entertainment. You can do everything digitally (cheap), and hardware can be made to be very power efficient (it just isn't because electricity is cheap).
IIRC the thermal efficiency of a PC/console is basically the same as most electric heating implements. I.e an electric radiator or a computer converts something like 80% of the energy it draws into heat. So theoretically, if you're heating a room with electricity, you're not polluting more when using a computer or console in it (apart from the servers/Internet consumption for online stuff)
Computers and electric heaters turn near-100% of the power into heat, as do most other things. Heat is just a waste product, electric heaters work by effectively "wasting" the electricity into heat.
I imagine most computer related pollution would come from big tech companies like Google (Alphabet), Microsoft, Amazon, etc. Since servers (Google Drive, Youtube, Onedrive, AWS, AI stuff) may require regular replacement of parts and a lot of electricity.
There's a reason they like to build their data centres next to power stations - it's significantly cheaper. Hopefully that gives you an idea just how much power they go through...
I don't have a console, but I've hooked up a Kill-A-Watt to my crazy gaming PC with a TDP > 600w. When working, browsing, listening to music, watching videos, etc, it only uses around 60w, or the same as a single incandescent light bulb. When playing a modern AAA game, it uses around 250w. Not great considering the power consumption of a Switch or Steam Deck, but orders of magnitude less than typical U.S. household heating and cooling. I'd guess AI and crypto BS uses more energy than all PCs combined. Though I guess we all indirectly use AI (or rather, get used by AI).