I'm running a 4090 at 280W, and I'm seeing ~96% of the performance of 450W. There's no need to run it at full power.

Also doing the same here. I'm hoping that more places will run power to performance analysis like the derbauer 4090 review video.

You can turn the power level down usually without hugely reducing performance, it's quite non-linear.

This 100%. When I still built PCs, I'd usually throttle the heck out of the GPU and CPU fan curves and keep them off or just barely on but inaudible. Usually that'd mean going down to medium settings or so, but games still look good enough (and run at a high FPS) it doesn't really matter. And that made the in-room experience a lot nicer.

I wonder how DLSS and frame gen affects power usage. Presumably they save power vs drawing real frames, but I haven't tested it...?

I used to do this too, now I mostly just game on Apple hardware or on Switch, which feels like the logical progression of what I was going for with less fuss.

Yeah, I can play BG3 on low settings on my M2 Max comfortably (at native res) and the fan doesn't get very loud. But the rest of the time it doesn't come on at all.

The Rosetta games (which is most of them) suck though, and Crossover/Whisky is such a hit or miss experience.

On the other hand, with GFN I can turn everything up to ultra and it looks great, and there's no fan or noise at all and barely sips the battery.

The library of games suck on Mac, but I realized my backlog has gotten so huge that I will still never run out of games that run well on there. I've got BG3 in my backlog, but I figure I'll wait until I get a new machine in a few years before I try running it.

My work machine is a M2 Max and I have a studio display. Every day I fight the temptation to install Steam and load up No Man's Sky on it...

I bet the Studio Display would be beautiful to game on, especially for a colorful game like that!

I don't think the M2 can comfortably drive that resolution at 60 fps though :/ As much as I love Apple Silicon, the GPU is a lot weaker than a RTX card. Especially since it lacks any of the AI features.

GFN offers day passes and works with your Steam library if you want to give it a shot. You don't have to install anything, just sign up for a day and you can play No Man's Sky in a browser window at max settings. (But I think you might need the GFN app to play at full native resolution or with proper HDR, not sure).

The nice thing about Studio Display is that it's exactly 2X the resolution of 1440p, so that resolution works very nicely on it. Definitely want to give GFN a shot too though, thanks for the recommendation.

Im thinking more and more about putting my computer outside when I game.

I have 50 and 150 ft fiber optic DisplayPort cables. Can do 8k60, or 4k240. Can be had for like $70, work fine.

The hard part is input? I'm no stranger to USB extension cables. But I don't love them. They're so bulky, and they usually need 5v in every 50ft, and since USB hierarchy tops out at 7 deep and each cable is actually 2 hubs, you can only really chain two 50 ft cables together (and a 25 ft shorter active extension too, then hub and device.. gee since the cables sre hubs would sure be nice if someone made an active USB extension cable that exposed all 4 ports at the end!). Here's a well reviewed example for $42, https://www.amazon.com/Extension-Extender-Repeater-Boosters-...

There are some usb4 over fiber optic solutions, but often more than $150 for 100 ft, which is kind of a drag. Spent money on stupider things, maybe will do it.