Hello Flip fans!
I have a slightly different show for you today. Given the current state of the economy - with all of us facing credit crunch and rising gas prices - combined with my huge sense of guilt for indulging in a pastime that isn’t always easy to justify as green, I have put together some of my top tips for greener gaming.
Handily, they should save you some money, too.
Enjoy the show,
Katharine
I concur with Jeffrey’s post.
Keep up the good work,
Jon
That was a good idea for a show.
Worth a Digg to save the world?
I have to say, very good podcast.
I have one thing to point out however. Whilst powering down consoles when they aren’t in use for a few minutes is good practice, exercise caution when doing so with PC’s. Whilst sleep mode does help considerably, the power used to turn a PC off and on, is roughly the same as one hour idle. By idle, I do however mean on the desktop, not paused. If you pause a game, the graphics card is still working in 3D mode and is also rendering everything on screen at the fastest it can in most games.
So when taking a short break, (up to 20 minutes maybe) just exit the game and switch off your monitor. If you’re going away for a little while to pop and get something from the shop or watch something on TV (between 20 minutes and an hour) put the computer into sleep mode. If you’re leaving your computer for anymore than an hour, switch it all off and switch it back on when you return.
Hibernate (a feature which still isn’t used a great deal) is sort of a half way house between switching off your PC and standing by. It takes slightly longer to come on and uses a little more power than standby in the short term (as entering Hibernate dumps the RAM contents onto the hard drive, and needs to be loaded into RAM again when powering up) however it usually is considerably faster than a full shutdown and power up. I wouldn’t recommend this as something to do every night, however if you are leaving your PC for a few hours yet want to get right back to what you were doing, it can be most helpful. One downside of hibernate is that it doesn’t store what was in graphics memory and as such games may crash when being restored, the same thing does apply to sleep mode also as the graphics card effectively gets switched off.
I hope this helps some people to game a little greener!
One final note. I know that Folding@Home and SETI@Home are really helpful to universities, however they aren’t helpful to you. They cause your PC (or now your PS3) CPU to run at full speed calculating information which is great for their pursuits however it really uses a lot of electricity so please switch them off!
RattyocasteR wrote:
“Whilst sleep mode does help considerably, the power used to turn a PC off and on, is roughly the same as one hour idle. By idle, I do however mean on the desktop, not paused. ”
This is simply not true. A current gaming PC uses more than 100W in idle mode. An hour in idle mode uses 100Wh of energy. 100Wh = 6′000Wmin = 360′000Wsec. So to reach this with the startup current that is used for say 1 sec, the PC would have to draw 360 kW 
Neither PSU nor cable nor wall socket nor fuses would survive this. Powering down the PC doesn’t cause a spike as big as starting it anyway, so I won’t bother to do even simplest math.
If you mean the whole startup process: During BIOS and starting up the OS, the processor and probably the graphics card runs at full speed. The PC uses, say, 300 W, for one minute or so, i.e. 5Wh, nowhere comparable to the 100Wh used for one hour of idling.
What hasn’t be noted: for advanced PC users, consider undervolting your processor and graphics card. Saves current and helps cooling a lot!
Cool epsiode
I have to admit to not turning my Xbox off all the time, if I go to lunch I normally leave it on so I can come straight back to it, from now on hopefully I’ll think about, and turn it off before getting something to eat.
enoch,
Whilst I understand what you’re saying, I still don’t agree. I once install a high quality PSU (Xilence I think was the brand) which was 420W. This PSU was installed into a machine with a Athlon x2 4800+, 2 GB RAM and a GeForce 7900GT. Whilst starting up (still loading background apps on desktop to be more precise, roughly 2 minutes after pushing the button) the PC switched itself off. I repeated a boot and it switched itself off again. After trying a 500W PSU the machine behaved properly. Assuming that say a full shutdown and restart (By that I mean closing apps, shutting down and then powering up and opening apps) takes 5 minutes. For easiness lets consider that the PSU was working fully for this time. This adds up to 126000J of energy to power the computer. Assuming that idling it’s using 100W of energy it’s still over 1/3. So…in conclusion, only shut it down if you’re going to be away for more than 20 minutes. So those of you who smoke, when you go for a bind, don’t switch your PC off if you’re only off for 1.
Nice idea for an episode, and I loved how you tied it with gaming
My god, but you’re lovely.
Hey Katharine,
Stumbled across this article slamming the secondhand games market and wondered what you thought.
http://www.destructoid.com/braben-rawr-rawr-pre-owned-games-rawr-rawr-rawr–97398.phtml
I personally tend to buy new games then sell them via Amazon marketplace, so I benefit from the used market. It reduces my expediture on gaming and is helping in a small way to save the planet, but is it at the expense of the developers/publishers?
Its a bit of a legal and moral grey area, but I generally believe you have the right to sell on something you have physically purchased.
I’d be interested to hear your thoughts on it.
J
Another green tip for new games is Live Marketplace, Plystation store, Steam and EA Download manager to name a few. All of these services allow you to download full games without having to go to the store and get a physical disk. To some extent you can do these in the background of your normal gaming (consoles tend to shut off downloads while running internet games though to prevent latency). As a result you aren’t using disks (which means on consoles, loading times are smaller and also means less disks need to be produced), in more tiny changes, your hard drive is drawing power anyway but at least no power is being used to work the CD drive which only makes a small contribution but every little helps
Hey everyone - thanks for all of the comments. I have to admit I was a bit nervous about putting this show out, so thank you so much for the support. I’m also really heartened to hear so many of you rallying to the cause and grateful for the other tips suggested. Things like turning a computer or console off for half an hour doesn’t always sound like a big difference, but if everyone does it it will be. I have to admit, I’ve not always been very good at things like this, but I’ve been make a concerted effort over the last few years and now it’s just become automatic and doesn’t feel inconvenient.
As for the debate about turning off a PC, I don’t know enough to wade in with the technical details myself (and am grateful to both RattyocasteR and enoch for providing information), but from what I’d read on other sites written by people knowledgeable about such things, I was under the impression that the thing about turning a PC on and off using more power than leaving it running was a myth. Whatever your view though, and whatever time period you end up deciding is reasonable, if you at least put it into sleep mode for those 10, 20, 30 minutes you’ll be helping too.
And Jim, I personally try to buy as much as I can second hand (be it clothes, furniture, books, games), but there are instances when I might make exceptions to this, e.g. to support an independent publication. I guess my view would be to do whatever your conscience tells you. It’s difficult when different ethical values clash against one another, and I guess its up to each of us to choose our priorities.
Nice piece. I have been put off by discussions of building gaming rigs that take no consideration of power consumption and heat generation. I want a fast machine that makes games look great but why should power consumption and power supply sizes be going UP as technology advances?
It’s one thing to ‘waste’ energy to amuse myself, its another thing to waste it to heat up my room for an extra 3 fps.
Katharine,
That was an awesome episode, great tips and it is wonderful to see a game that shows it is possible to care about the environment and still be a gamer.
You and the rest of the ChannelFlip team do a wonderful job, thanks for the hard work,
Jeffrey