NVIDIA Power Management: control the power usage of NVIDIA cards
Modern video cards can be quite power hungry. While that is good when you play the most taxing games or run applications that benefit from it, it may not be ideal all the time. Playing Solitaire at full power may cause electricity bills go through the roof.
NVIDIA Power Management is an open source application for Windows devices with NVIDIA cards. It gives administrators more control over power usage through the use of GPU power profiles and features that extend the capabilities of the Windows operating system and NVIDIA's own control panel.
The developer of the application notes that the tool works in the boundaries set by NVIDIA. It is not an overclocking tool for power, which means that the existing maximum and minimum ranges for power are honored by it.
NVIDIA Power Management uses the System Management Interface to manage power settings. NVIDIA's tool is a command line utility that enables administrators to to query and modify GPU device states. The command line tool supports NVIDIA Tesla, GRID, Quadro and Titan X products, and may also work in limited capacity with other NVIDIA graphics processors.
The application has a graphical user interface. Main features include creating power limits for individual applications, power groups for multiple applications, a basic performance monitor, adaptive power usage and more.
One of the interesting features of the application is that it can be used to create power groups. Each group has a power configuration, e.g., to set certain power limits. Users may then assign applications to groups and NVIDIA Power Management tool will apply these as soon as it notices that one of the assigned applications runs on the system.
A high power usage group could use maximum or close to maximum power, so that graphically demanding games and apps, like Cyberpunk 2077, Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 or Call of Duty: Warzone, get the power they require. Another group could hold games and apps that run well even when power usage is limited. This could reduce the power consumption of the device.
The application restores the original settings once all apps or games that are assigned to groups are no longer running on the system. Speaking of which, all settings apply to the active session only. A restart of the Windows device restores the defaults.
NVIDIA Power Management is a tool for enthusiasts and power users for the most part. It serves a few purposes, including getting the most out of games and apps, reducing power consumption or fan noise.
The application is free and open source, and interested users may download the latest version from its Sourceforge repository.
Now You: do you use power management apps or overclocking/underclocking programs?
Power managment is already available in the Nvidia control panel which is now installed automatically from windows update right after installing Nvidia drivers.
When it comes to custom clock speeds and fan curves, MSI Afterburner is pretty much the gold standard for both Nvidia and AMD gpu.