Today, NVIDIA released their GeForce 416.81 drivers, which among others, contains the following changelog entry: "[Turing GPU]: Multi-monitor idle power draw is very high. [2400161]". Back at launch in September, Turing was plagued with very high non-gaming power consumption, in both single-monitor and multi-monitor idle.

The company was quick to fix single-monitor power consumption, which we tested promptly. Unfortunately, at the time, multi-monitor power draw wasn't improved and people were starting to get worried that there might be some kind of unfixable issue present on Turing that would prevent NVIDIA from fixing multi-monitor power draw.

Using today's 416.81 drivers I did a few quick runs for power consumption on all three existing GeForce 20 SKUs; the RTX 2070, RTX 2080 and RTX 2080 Ti.As you can see, multi-monitor power consumption is finally back at normal levels. Good job, NVIDIA! While the power draw of Pascal cards is still a little bit lower, the differences are now negligible, and won't have any significant effect on power usage, power bill, temperatures, or the environment.

I also did a run measuring single-monitor idle power - no changes here, but not needed either. In case you wonder, since these changes are part of the driver, nothing special will have to be done for custom boards from the various NVIDIA partners. No BIOS update needed, just install the 416.81 drivers and multi-monitor power consumption will go down by more than half.