Sounding Board: No New Graphics!

It’s been a little over two months since NVIDIA announced their newest graphics cards, the 4000 series. The biggest of the beasts is over 12 inches long and almost as high as a PS5. The public is celebrating this announcement as a resounding success. Technological futurism has succeeded! They declare it with aplomb. 

“We have developed, against all odds, against the Russians, against inflation, against the collapse of democracy, the next generation in video game hardware! We have crafted graphics cards so powerful as to answer the question of all questions; how much energy does it take to create life?

“Every gamer in every household will be able to spin up at will an entire raytraced universe in which to rediscover creation itself. Hopefully the artistic among you will be able to develop something nice enough to live in.” 

My immediate reaction was stillness. I still to this day have not been able to get a PS5 or Xbox Series X. I worked as hard as I could muster during 2020-21 to afford a new gaming laptop, with a squished and depowered RTX3070 functioning almost as intended. I stretched myself to the limits for access to better graphics; what were at the time exalted as the best graphics.

In recent months I found myself struggling to enjoy the portions of time I dedicated to playing games. Attempting escapism, I would boot up my newly discounted and newly purchased game (probably a game you also have or at least know of) and immediately be shunted back to a place of discomfort. Seeing the slime-green NVIDIA frame counter in the top right of my screen, I was again made blisslessly aware of how lackluster my gaming experience was about to be. A terrifying notion began to continuously creep into my thoughts: was I experiencing the true version of this game without the proper hardware, the proper settings? How much more enjoyment, more satisfaction would I get (could I get) out of this game (out of my life)? 

After seeing the thunderous applause which welcomed the RTX 4090 into being, thoughts of good graphics filled my mind, and more specifically, thoughts about how big they had become. For the first time in my life, I met the announcement of new graphics, better graphics, bigger graphics, with sadness and trepidation instead of excitement and applause. Walking through Times Square the following Tuesday morning, I spotted a 40-foot-wide gym advertisement brighter than the sun, and with it the problem. 

Somehow, two great evils have befallen video games. I recognized one of them the first time I heard that 4090s were melting some people’s power supplies^[1]1. Clairebois, Lâm. “RTX 4090: More Burnt Cable Stories.” Overclocking.Com, 7 Nov. 2022, https://en.overclocking.com/rtx-4090-more-burnt-cable-stories/. I spotted the other when I got home again, and looked upon my own PC, wishing it was something greater than it was, wishing I was greater than I was. Richer, fitter, healthier, happier.  

We live every day with the crushing realization that the earth is a shattered mess^[2]More Bad News for the Planet: Greenhouse Gas Levels Hit New Highs. 21 Oct. 2022, https://public.wmo.int/en/media/press-release/more-bad-news-planet-greenhouse-gas-levels-hit-new-highs. That thought is followed by smaller, sharper reminders. When I charge my phone, when I run the AC, when I refrigerate, when I boot up my PC every evening after work, I too (in my infinitesimal space and fractional value in GDP) am contributing to the daily disastrous effects of human planetary violence. 

I play video games to get away from those reminders. The tiny alarm bells ring quiet at first, and then louder and louder as cars scream by and planes rip the sky overhead, until finally I’m drunk or asleep or playing something I don’t love to waste a few minutes before bed.

In this light, I realized that new graphics cards,  new arms races between suppliers,  new scalpers’ paradises, represented potentially a series of bad choices on the consumer’s end, but more realistically it presented a moral wrong on behalf of graphics card suppliers. Big Graphics as an industry is trying to convince us that we need more graphics, more raytracing, more gluttonous RAM, more everything in everyspace, until every game is finally perfect. Until the fantasy is so real that it will whisk us all away from problems so large they make my teeth chatter in the dark. Until the Fantasy can’t be undone. 

Who are these graphics for anyway? According to the November 2022 Steam hardware survey, only 2.6% of gamers have adopted 4K as their standard gaming resolution^[3]Steam Hardware & Software Survey. https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Software-Survey-Welcome-to-Steam. Accessed 18 Dec. 2022. Shockingly few people even own a graphics card capable of bounding beyond the ubiquitous 1080P 30FPS. The lion’s share of the hardware market goes surprisingly to  the GTX 1650 at 6,05%, the GTX 1060 5.56%, the RTX 2060 at 4.48%, the RTX 3060 (Laptop) at 4.46%, and then the GTX 1050i with 4.45%. A heart-wrenching 0.51% of Steam users use a RTX 3090. 

With so few people actually accessing “good graphics,” I feel like we are beginning to see a new sham framed around convincing us that graphics increases are more important than anything else in the industry, even though so few of us actually experience it. Why is it that so little of the conversation is concerned with efficiency? I believe we have laid bare, in such a strange example, the wanton nature of capitalism through consumption habits, which centers itself on increases in everything no matter how relevant or wasteful.

So little of the actual games-minded population is able to access graphical capabilities beyond a solid 1080p, and I’m sure the population that does have access is highly concentrated in the global north. These increased graphics drive emissions through the roof, increase speculative scalping, and increase dev time and cost on the biggest and best games. 

How do we justify these graphics if no one is even able to use them? Many of the biggest and loudest graphics on the market at the moment begin to trip over themselves as they approach 4K120FPS. Like matter approaching the speed of light, the physics engines go beyond known mathematics and collapse under their own weight. How do we justify graphical improvements made with no concern for the consequences? My goal here is not to shame game players and PC builders, for that would just be another case of corporations convincing us that the climate crisis is our individual fault. Exactly the opposite: instead we should re-evaluate the structure of the industry we enjoy and pick apart exactly how we got here.

We know graphics aren’t for us, but who then do they serve? It should seem obvious at this point but they exist to drive up profits, drive up hype, and increase NVIDIA’s shareholder returns no matter the cost to the consumer or the environment. Graphics have become the new makeup, the new diet, the new Midlife-Crisis Corvette. Somehow, while marketers frantically bait our hopes and dreams on the fishing hook of 8K, the graphics card black market feeds the ever-growing beast of cryptocurrency, fully ensuring that no card is without its cost. 

Advertisers are paying idiot’s sums of money to convince us that your esporting would be better at 120 FPS and 4K would make you more accurate. All the while, those of us who partake in slower story-heavy games are being sold the concept that we could extract more meaning, more beauty, more fulfillment from the games we love with a graphics card that literally burns a hole in your wall^[4]“This RTX 4090 GPU Has a Huge Problem — It Caught Fire.” Digital Trends, 24 Oct. 2022, https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/nvidia-geforce-rtx-4090-connector-burns-up/. While we choose between performance and quality modes, something terrible happens elsewhere. 

So how much power are we already consuming? It is often reported^[5]“Number of PC Gamers Worldwide 2024.” Statista, https://www.statista.com/statistics/420621/number-of-pc-gamers/ Accessed 18 Dec. 2022. that the PC-gaming population globally looks to be approaching 1.82 billion people, and if each PC on average consumes 1400 kilowatt-hours per year^[6]Mills, Nathaniel, and Evan Mills. “Taming the Energy Use of Gaming Computers.” Energy Efficiency, vol. 9, no. 2, Apr. 2016, pp. 321–38. DOI.org (Crossref), … Continue reading, that means our ilk are probably ingesting close to 2.5 trillion kWh of power per year on PC gamers alone. It’s worth noting that when I put this math into Wolfram Alpha to make sure my units were correctly converted, it returned another little nugget of data letting me know that 2.5 Trillion kWh of power is almost as much power as the entire U.S. nuclear energy output per year. How can I continue to avoid thinking about climate change if the thing causing the problem roars to life every time I boot up my next best escape plan?

Evan Mills, the researcher responsible for the depressing statistics above, released a second paper in 2019 titled “Toward Greener Gaming: Estimating National Energy Use and Energy Efficiency Potential^[7]Mills, Evan, et al. “Toward Greener Gaming: Estimating National Energy Use and Energy Efficiency Potential.” The Computer Games Journal, vol. 8, no. 3–4, Dec. 2019, pp. 157–78. DOI.org … Continue reading” which gives us even more depressing figures:

“In aggregate, we find that gaming represents $5 billion per year in energy expenditures across the United States or 34 TWh/year (2.4% of residential electricity nationally), with 24 MT/year of associated carbon-dioxide emissions equivalent to that of 85 million refrigerators or over 5 million cars.”

How does this kind of power usage compare to green energy production? I’m not delusional about climate change, but I hope against all hopes that if the world outside is on fire, that  we will all at least get to continue playing video games in our underground Death Stranding-style bunkers. 

The United States Geological Survey quotes average wind turbine performance at 843,000 kWh/ month, with 41% efficiency^[8]How Many Homes Can an Average Wind Turbine Power? | U.S. Geological Survey. … Continue reading. We know as well that there are about 341,000 wind turbines currently operational on the planet^[9]Media, Digital Real. “There Are over 341,000 Wind Turbines on the Planet: Here’s How Much of a Difference They’re Actually Making.” Global Wind Energy Council, 11 Sept. 2017, … Continue reading, and if we multiply the average energy production by the number of units, we should end up with about  287.5 Billion kWh of power being generated globally per month by wind power or 3.45 Trillion kWh/year. This means that as a race, we are already consuming close to the energy production of the entire wind industry annually, and this is only at average hardware specs. 

This might not seem like a huge problem, considering the often-touted figure that the earth is now running on 30% renewable energy^[10]Duggal, Hanna. Interactive: How Much of Your Country’s Electricity Is Renewable? https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/1/20/interactive-how-much-of-your-countrys-electricity-is-renewable-infographic … Continue reading. Though, as I’m sure you have come to expect, if you look closer at the numbers, a darker truth comes forward. Out of all the renewable energy being produced globally, over 55% of it is biomass^[11]Wood Pellet Biomass | Dogwood Alliance. 3 Aug. 2021, https://www.dogwoodalliance.org/our-work/wood-pellet-biomass/. 

Biomass isn’t only trees, Biomass can be many things including  “wood, farm waste, and organic materials in trash” and much more according to to Harvard’s School of Public Health^[12]Boston, 677 Huntington Avenue and Ma 02115 +1495‑1000. “Health Consequences of Using Biomass for Energy.” News, 11 Apr. 2022, … Continue reading, and by burning biomass to create energy of any kind we are still releasing carbon into the atmosphere along with heavy metals, chemicals, and other extremely dangerous things^[13]https://www.pfpi.net/air-pollution-2 Accessed 18 Dec. 2022.. Sounds fun right?

The main part here which feels like a seismic sucker punch to the guts is that we have been told for years that Biomass is primarily used for heating homes in underdeveloped nations. Again the truth feels like a bomb: biomass is the main source of renewable energy for the UK^[14]A Burning Issue: Biomass Is the Biggest Source of Renewable Energy Consumed in the UK – Office for National Statistics. … Continue reading, Germany^[15]Baumgarten, Wibke & Kerckow, Birger & Hennig, Christiane & Thrän, Daniela & Fritsche, Uwe. (2022). IEA Bioenergy TCP Country Reports 2021 – Germany. … Continue reading, China^[16]2021 Country Reports | Bioenergy. https://www.ieabioenergy.com/blog/publications/2021-country-reports/ Accessed 18 Dec. 2022., and many others. 

In its current state, the dream of 4K 120FPS for everyone cannot become universal with the industry valuing power over efficiency, as it poses a mortal harm to us all. If we take the power consumption of the 4000 series (450 Watts) and multiply that by the number of hours on average people play video games on PC per year (416 hours) which we got from Evan Mill’s research from before,  we get an average consumption of 1,872 kWh per year. Doesn’t seem that much higher right? The horrifying part happens when you stretch that small increase out across the energy consumption of all the 1.82 Billions PC gamers. A future in which we all game with 4000s would consume 3.407 trillion kWh of power per year (331,344,000,000,000), or to be more frank, that would be .92% the yearly power consumption of the entire goddamned United States^[17]“Energy Consumption in the United States of America.” Worlddata.Info, https://www.worlddata.info/america/usa/energy-consumption.php Accessed 18 Dec. 2022.. 

We are only producing enough wind power to cover 88% of just PC gaming electricity on the entire earth right now. How, in the face of something so terrifying, are we still continuing to talk about bigger, better, more disastrous graphics? We have to change the narrative here. I’m not inherently against good graphics, in fact I love them, however nowhere to be found is anything resembling a conversation about efficiency. We just keep gluing CUDA cores together hoping the world will change for us.

Again I ask who are these graphics for? They aren’t for people who love video games, they aren’t for you (other than to be a siren’s call to draw you into more purchases), they are for the 873 mutual funds and 377 ETFs holding NVIDIA stock, and the thousands more holding Intel, AMD, or Apple. We are being sold increasing fidelity for the sold purpose of increased GDP in a time where our overconsumption of power and resources rip apart the earth as we know it.

Fortunately, now that we have identified the problem, a solution emerges from the slime. Evan Mills published “Enhancing the computer gaming experience while radically reducing energy requirements^[18]Home. https://greengaming.lbl.gov/ Accessed 18 Dec. 2022.” in 2019, which lays out a framework for how to understand this issue, and what we can do about it if we still want to have a planet to play our games on at all: 

“Our research suggests that energy use can be reduced by 50-75% while improving performance and mitigating heat production and noise levels. However, aside from the 80 Plus labels for power supply units and Energy Star ratings for computer displays, little has been done to identify energy efficiency opportunities.”

We need to use our collective bargaining power to make it clear that efficiency needs to be a major portion of the conversation around gaming hardware. I want to live in a world where the announcement of a new graphics card is filled with as much marketing copy around its efficiency rating as it is the number of ray-tracing cores.