Power down

With an energy crisis looming, which games and features are the most costly?

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TESTING TIMES

QA firms such as Kudos stand to really feel the pinch when electricity prices go up, testers being the definition of high-intensity players. "Games that are higher performance on PCs running higher-tech video cards use a lot of energy, and then there are monitors and other equipment - we try to turn everything off after use," Andy Robson notes. "But I'd say mobile is [also bad] because you have to charge. We've got about 80-odd devices. If you're doing a compatibility run or testing on them, you've got to have them fully charged all the time."

Unless governments intervene, the coming year will see a catastrophic rise in energy prices, with average UK annual gas and electricity bills forecast to more than double by January 2023. It's a good time, then, to think about reducing your gaming energy footprint. There are more obvious, broader gambits here, such as using the energy-saving modes offered by PS5 and Xbox, or playing multiplatform titles on lower-wattage machines such as Nintendo's Switch. But power consumption also varies hugely between individual games, and you can reap significant returns by fiddling creatively with their settings.

Take vertical sync, which synchronises a game's framerate with your monitor's refresh rate. It's typically treated as a graphics feature, used to avoid unsightly screen tearing, where the image appears duplicated horizontally. But it's also an easy way of reducing your power consumption. According to a two-year study of gaming. market energy demands completed in 2016 by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory on behalf of the California Energy Commission, turning V-sync on reduced the system's power usage during play by as much as 39 per cent.