use lots of power and try all kinds of ways of reducing the consumption, such as undervolting, frame rate caps, or lowering the max power limit. Graphics card vendor PowerColor is experimenting with a slightly different approach by using an NPU to manage the power usage in games, without impacting performance, in a system called Edge AI.
What I suspect is going on is that the NPU is running a neural network that takes metrics such as the GPU's load, voltage, and temperature, as well as aspects from the game being rendered, and alters the GP voltage in such a way that the power consumption is significantly reduced on average. Reducing the power consumption of a graphics card has multiple benefits—less heat is dissipated into your gaming room, the whole PC uses less electricity, and the peripheral components on the graphics card will last longer. All that seems worth the relatively small drop in performance.Keep up to date with the most important stories and the best deals, as picked by the PC Gamer team.
I don't think PowerColor is planning on releasing a graphics card with an NPU on the circuit board, as that would eat into the profit margins. Instead, I suspect it's preparing Edge AI to be ready for when NPUs are routinely embedded in desktop CPUs from every vendor and if that's the case, then it's one of the few uses of AI that I'd genuinely look forward to seeing in action.