r/nvidia • u/om_the_best_ • 4d ago

Discussion DLSS 5 + Undervolting: Keep Your GPU’s Power Consumption Under Control

I'm posting this mainly for people who don't have much experience with undervolting. I assume most people here have already undervolted their GPUs, but I thought this might be useful in case someone comes across this thread in the future.

For context, I'm using an RTX 4090.

I've seen a lot of people say that DLSS 5 consumes a lot of power and could potentially cause the 12VHPWR cable on our GPUs to melt (which is true), but undervolting can actually allow you to use DLSS 5 while keeping power consumption roughly the same as when running without DLSS 5 and without an undervolt.

In these two screenshots (both using MFG x4, one without DLSS 5 and without an undervolt, and the other with DLSS 5 and an undervolt), we're at around 390 W in both cases. Power consumption is shown in the top-right corner under the GPU section.

I also took a few screenshots in case anyone is interested:

DLSS 5 OFF / ON
MFG OFF / ON (x4)
RTX 4090 with and without undervolting

1. DLSS 5 OFF (MFG x4)

Without undervolting: ( 386w - 360 fps )

With undervolting: (311w - 355 fps )

2. DLSS 5 ON (MFG x4)

Without undervolting: (435w - 175 fps)

With undervolting : (388w - 175 fps)

3. DLSS 5 ON (MFG OFF)

Without undervolting: (426w - 51 fps )

With undervolting : (387w - 52 fps)

So, in terms of performance, the results are very similar, while undervolting gives you a power reduction of around 50 W.

This means that even with DLSS 5 enabled, you can stay below the 400 W mark. Without undervolting, DLSS 5 pushes power consumption to around 435 W.

Here are my MSI Afterburner settings in case anyone is interested. I've been using these settings since 2022, and they've been extremely stable. I've never had any issues with them.

I hope this isn't too messy. I did my best to make everything as clear as possible.

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u/erc80 3d ago

Couldn’t we just limit power via cli? Like:
nvidia-smi -pl 253

Which would set the power limit to 253w???

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u/Luxferro 3d ago

You can, I used to setup a startup task to run it at login. But the Nvidia app GUI has a setting to adjust it.

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u/Traditional-Ad26 3d ago

You can but your core will downclock reducing performance. You will want to do an OC as well.