Does Lucid Virtu work any better with the Radeon 7000 series than the 6000 series?

[MonkeyK]

When Anand did the article on Lucid Virtu last year , the power saving on a Radeon 6970 were somewhat disappointing at just a touch below the nominal idle power of the 6970. Comparatively, the GTX 460 powered down to 1/3 of it's nominal idle power showing that virtu was able to affect its power usage to a far greater degee.

Has anyone been able to determine if Virtu is able to do more with the Radeon 7000 series cards?

 

[3DVagabond]

When Anand did the article on Lucid Virtu last year , the power saving on a Radeon 6970 were somewhat disappointing at just a touch below the nominal idle power of the 6970. Comparatively, the GTX 460 powered down to 1/3 of it's nominal idle power showing that virtu was able to affect its power usage to a far greater degee.

Has anyone been able to determine if Virtu is able to do more with the Radeon 7000 series cards?

I don't see how it could. The 7000 series virtually shuts off.

 

[thilanliyan]

^Yeah the 7 series has "zerocore" tech which basically shuts the card down, without need for Virtu.

 

[MonkeyK]

My understanding of zerocore is that it is enabled when one does not need to use the monitor. The point of Virtu is that it is supposed to use the igpu during less demanding tasks (like Web browsing). The review noted that Virtu was less than perfect at telling the dgpu to go idle when it was time to use the igpu.

 

[ViRGE]

You can't do much better short of completely shutting off the GPU. Desktop motherboards generally can't handle that, so the next best thing is to shut down everything except the PCIe interface on the GPU, which is what ZeroCore is doing. So it should be as good as things can get.

 

[wahdangun]

but HD 7 series already have low idle, so it kind moot point.

 

[MonkeyK]

Is the card idling when the user is doing things that update the display? Say Web browsing or editing a word processing document.

 

[wahdangun]

yep,

 

[MonkeyK]

Thanks. That's where I was misunderstanding.

 

[SlowSpyder]

Reading this thread, my Kill-a-Watt shows just 146 watts. When I had two Sapphre Vapor-X 5870s in CF, light use such as browsing would show over 200 watts.

 

[gladiatorua]

light use such as browsing would show over 200 watts.

Turn off hardware acceleration in your browser if it bothers you.

 

[SlowSpyder]

Turn off hardware acceleration in your browser if it bothers you.

It never bothered me... I was just stating the numbers for a comparrison. The 7xxx uses a lot less power by default compared to my old 5870's while at idle clocks.

 

[3DVagabond]

Turn off hardware acceleration in your browser if it bothers you.

Well, he doesn't have the cards any more. The 7000 series don't do it.

 

[bononos]

Does the Lucid Virtu function have a large overhead - showing in significant framerate loss in games?