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AMD’s Radeon Chill drops frame rate during light gaming to save battery life

AMD’s Radeon Chill drops frame rate during light gaming to save battery life

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Help your GPU chill

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Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

AMD back in December said its Radeon Chill tool, part of the GPU maker’s latest Adrenaline Edition software suite, supports games based on the Vulkan graphics API as well as games that rely on DirectX 9, 10, 11, and 12. And today, the company released a helpful how-to video on getting started with it.

Radeon Chill, which AMD first released in late 2016 but has updated steadily over time, improves power efficiency in your gaming laptop or PC by dropping your frame rate when it detects lower-than-normal mouse and keyboard inputs. That’s because such a scenario suggests the image displayed on the screen isn’t drastically changing by way of the mouse-controlled in-game camera or keyboard-controlled character movements.

With a so-called dynamic frame rate regulator, the goal is to help the GPU draw less power, which is great for conserving battery life on a gaming laptop and also beneficial to desktop PC gamers who are concerned about power efficiency. For a how-to guide on enabling Radeon Chill and customizing its settings, such as the designated frame rate the tool will reduce your games to, check out AMD’s YouTube explainer here.

Correction: A previous version of this article misstated when AMD added support for games based on the Vulkan API. The update went out in December 2017, not today. We regret the error.