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I think you might be missing the point a bit. I'm answering the question "Why not optimize for CO2 emission instead ?" So, in what plausible scenario would a g

I think you might be missing the point a bit. I'm answering the question "Why not optimize for CO2 emission instead ?" So, in what plausible scenario would a gamer's CO2 output (which is mostly power use) be significantly influenced by download time? The vast majority of people spend a lot more time playing than downloading. If your connection is really bad, then you're probably going to buy physical media or play something smaller. There's no plausible scenario I can think of in which a significant amount of people sits there waiting for an hour for a game to download, on a daily basis, and where the amount of power consumption caused by that is significant when compared to what's consumed by actual game play. Yeah, I get that giant updates might be annoying to you personally. But the discussion is about CO2.

PaulHoule 4y ago
Can I force my telco to upgrade to fiber because it is a waste of carbon for my computer to be switched on for hours downloading content over ADSL? I have two ADSL connections that can download at 20 Mbits/s with a load balancer. With my XBOX ONE I don't really have a choice of physical media, even if I have physical media I'd expect to download between 2-40 GB of patches or additional content. It is definitely a hassle but not prohibitive, generally I install a game before I expect to play it and keep up on downloads ahead of time. For PC games it is similar except most of the games I play I get off Steam I don't even know if physical media is available at all.
- dale_glass 4y ago
  Okay, let's calculate. At 20 Mbps, 40GB takes a bit over 4 hours to download. Supposing you have an idle power draw of 60W, that's 0.240 KWh. I think that's reasonable. Downloading is almost effortless for a modern computer, and I'll assume that you're not getting any more use of it, so the monitor turned itself off. Now compare that to a CPU easily having a TDP of 100W, plus a GPU drawing 180W, plus the rest of the computer, plus a monitor, etc, you can easily reach 400W. That'll blow through the power you consumed to download in half an hour. Also I don't think anyone releases 40GB patches on a daily basis, so if you game for say, 3 hours a day for a week, the costs of the download is already down to 3%. Which again is what I was getting at: you should optimize the biggest sources of waste first. Anything that makes your actual gameplay more efficient and consume less CPU or CPU resources will decrease your consumption far more noticeably than almost any optimization you can do to downloading stuff.

PaulHoule 4y ago

Can I force my telco to upgrade to fiber because it is a waste of carbon for my computer to be switched on for hours downloading content over ADSL? I have two ADSL connections that can download at 20 Mbits/s with a load balancer. With my XBOX ONE I don't really have a choice of physical media, even if I have physical media I'd expect to download between 2-40 GB of patches or additional content. It is definitely a hassle but not prohibitive, generally I install a game before I expect to play it and keep up on downloads ahead of time. For PC games it is similar except most of the games I play I get off Steam I don't even know if physical media is available at all.

dale_glass 4y ago
Okay, let's calculate. At 20 Mbps, 40GB takes a bit over 4 hours to download. Supposing you have an idle power draw of 60W, that's 0.240 KWh. I think that's reasonable. Downloading is almost effortless for a modern computer, and I'll assume that you're not getting any more use of it, so the monitor turned itself off. Now compare that to a CPU easily having a TDP of 100W, plus a GPU drawing 180W, plus the rest of the computer, plus a monitor, etc, you can easily reach 400W. That'll blow through the power you consumed to download in half an hour. Also I don't think anyone releases 40GB patches on a daily basis, so if you game for say, 3 hours a day for a week, the costs of the download is already down to 3%. Which again is what I was getting at: you should optimize the biggest sources of waste first. Anything that makes your actual gameplay more efficient and consume less CPU or CPU resources will decrease your consumption far more noticeably than almost any optimization you can do to downloading stuff.