14 DAY TRIAL // Back when NVIDIA introduced the GTX 500 series and its notorious “power-clamping” feature, aimed squarely at reducing the TDP within certain applications, we've actually wondered for a minute whether AMD would try-out something of the kind in their Radeon HD 6900 series, and sure enough, that was the case, the company revealing the fact that their cards will pack a technology called PowerTune.
The general purpose of AMD's PowerTune Technology is somewhat similar to that of the power throttling tech implemented in the GTX 500 series, namely that of optimizing power consumption and cutting power consumption in certain specific cases, in order to keep the TDP under a standard value (300W) in just about all usage scenarios.
However, the main difference between the two technologies is that PowerTune actually grants users a higher level of control over the power-throttling, enabling users to choose exactly just how their graphics card will behave in certain situations via the OverDrive Utility, but we'll come back to this particular topic a bit later.
Furthermore, it also provides direct control over GPU power draw (as opposed to indirect via clock/voltage tweaks), practically eliminating the need to constrain clocks speeds to allow for outlier applications.
One of the main reasons why AMD developed and implemented PowerTune is that games consistently operate at lower power than peak apps, thus leading, in some cases, to a lower overall level of performance.
However, with PowerTune, the graphics boards can be used to maximize game performance, something that users can do themselves, as they can easily increase the board power limits (in order to save power) or decrease them, allowing for improved power draw and thermals in apps that are very high performance.
To be perfectly honest, we're pretty sure that this feature will really come in handy for enthusiasts and overclockers, most mainstream users typically not really going anywhere near the OverDrive tab in AMD Catalyst Control Center (if they do happen to open it, from time to time), but its presence is nevertheless welcome, given the fact that, after all, the two categories of users mentioned above are exactly the ones targeted by AMD's Flagship Cayman-based boards.
