NVIDIA GeForce Power Efficiency: From The 6600GT "NV43" To The GTX 750 Ti "Maxwell"

Starting off with Doom 3, the GeForce 6600GT could barely run on Doom 3 and would crash after a while when using the NVIDIA 304 Linux graphics driver... Back in the day, the GeForce 6600GT was popular when this id Tech 4 game first premiered. The GeForce GTX 750 Ti averaged more than 223 FPS compared to the GeForce 8500GT at 14 FPS. In ten years the mid-range performance of the NVIDIA GeForce graphics hardware for Doom 3 is nearly 16x faster.

By far the hottest graphics card was the GeForce 8500GT, which in part is due to being the only passively cooled graphics card among the hardware tested. The GeForce 8500GT had an average temperature of 65 Celsius while the GTX 750 Ti average temperature was 38 Celsius.

When it came to the power consumption, the GeForce 8500GT was the most power-hungry at 156 Watts for the AC system power consumption while with the GeForce GTX 750 Ti installed it was at 105 Watts.

When automatically factoring the performance-per-Watt, the GeForce GTX 750 Ti "Maxwell" was to no surprise the lead performer. The GTX 750 Ti was delivering 14x better performance per Watt than the 8500GT, over 6x better performance per Watt than the 9500GT, and more than three times better performance per Watt than the GeForce GT 240. Over the GeForce GTX 550 Ti "Fermi", the mid-range Maxwell part delivered 1.73x better performance-per-Watt.