GPU Power Draw Simulator (2D): Frame Rate vs Energy Efficiency

Render Settings

Resolution

Graphics quality

Frame-rate cap 144 fps

GPU power limit 100%

Live Readouts

Power draw

— W

Achieved frame rate

— fps

Efficiency

— fps/W

Energy per hour

— Wh

Cool & efficient

Drag to pan the card view, scroll or pinch to zoom. The strip-chart at the bottom of the canvas plots the toggled metric over the last 20 seconds live.

How it works

A GPU's board power is dominated by dynamic power dissipation, which scales super-linearly with clock frequency because raising frequency also requires raising core voltage (dynamic voltage-frequency scaling, DVFS). This sim models it as a power law:

P = P_idle + a · f^n          (n ≈ 2.3, the combined V(f)·f scaling)
workload W = quality_load × resolution_factor
required clock f = FPS × W × k
FPS_achieved = min(FPS_cap, FPS_max(power_limit))
efficiency = FPS_achieved / P   (frames per watt)

Resolution / quality — more pixels and heavier shading (shadows, ray tracing) raise the workload W, so the same frame rate needs a higher clock — and power grows as roughly the square of that clock, not linearly.
Power limit — caps the maximum sustainable clock the card is allowed to reach, which caps the maximum achievable frame rate at a given workload.
Frame-rate cap — this is the real energy-saving lever: once FPS is capped below the card's ceiling, the GPU idles down its clock between frames, so power drops steeply as the frame-rate reduction grows. Capping 240 fps down to 60 fps at the same settings can cut power draw several times over.

This is the same trade-off real GPU vendors expose as "frame rate limiter" and "power limit / TDP slider" features, and the one streaming/cloud-gaming and data-center operators tune at scale to cut electricity cost and cooling load. This 2D dashboard uses the identical power-curve model as the 3D version, redrawn as a schematic heatsink cutaway plus a live strip-chart instead of a rendered card.

Heatsink fin temperature Cooling fan speed

drag = pan · scroll = zoom