Hardware

Published on August 26th, 2016 | by Admin

Carbon Footprint Study: Radeon RX 480 graphics cards slash energy use and cost

According to AMD’s new Radeon RX 480 Carbon Footprint Study, an upgrade cycle favouring this new affordable powerhouse reduces energy and carbon emissions by 40 percent while gaming and 32 percent overall1. It could also theoretically prevent as much as 1.9 million metric tons of carbon dioxide from entering our atmosphere every year2.

Designing energy efficient products is a major business imperative for AMD. Following the company’s 25×20 energy efficiency initiative to reduce carbon emissions and improve energy efficiency with its A-Series APUs, AMD’s newest GPUs – the Polaris architecture-based Radeon RX 400 Series – achieve up to 2.8 times the energy efficiency from the latest discrete GPU products when compared to AMD graphics chips of only two years ago.

But performance per watt is a metric that’s often difficult to imagine or relate to when scaled out to millions of graphics cards. What does a commitment to performance per watt actually do for our planet? To help contextualise the impact, AMD has expressed these savings as things we know and can see:

• According to American Forests, America’s oldest non-profit environmental conservation group, the average automobile is worth about 8,320 pounds of CO2 every year. That means that the Radeon RX 480 graphics cards could offset an entire year of driving from 500,000 automobiles.
• According to NC State University, the average American tree can offset about 48 pounds of CO2 per year. That means that the energy efficiency of Radeon RX 480 graphics cards could be worth a stunning 88.2 million trees.
• According to the US EPA greenhouse gas calculator, the 2.8 billion k/Wh annual energy savings determined in our paper represents about $350 million USD in annual saved energy costs.


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andrew@impulsegamer.com'



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