[SOLVED] Optimal vs Adaptive vs Maximum Performance ?

[groovex]

Hello! Few days ago I watched a few videos and read a couple of topics where people recommend setting the Optimal parameter in Power Management mode instead of Maximum Performance. People who recommend it say that there is nothing terrible about it for games and it may even be better for performance.

But there are other people who claim that in new games that can maximize the load on the processor and video card, this mode may not affect anything much. But in old games that may not load as much or as much as a processor with a video card. In this case, the Optimal setting can simply "fall asleep" without taking into account the game and think that this is a normal application that does not need to allocate resources to increase and maintain the frequency

The Maximum Performance parameter (whether we are playing a game, watching a video, searching for information on the Internet, just being in standby/afk mode) always maintains frequencies at a high level, which means that in older games this setting can help. But the question arises - how exactly to find out in which old games you need to set this setting, if the difference cannot be immediately felt and seen. The following follows from this question - which games does Nvidia Control Panel consider old?

It's strange that few people recommend Adaptive Mode. What can you say about this parameter? Can it improve performance in games on a laptop?

 

[hotaru.hino]

But the question arises - how exactly to find out in which old games you need to set this setting, if the difference cannot be immediately felt and seen. The following follows from this question - which games does Nvidia Control Panel consider old?

If there's no difference when changing the setting, then it's not a problem with the power settings. And the NVIDIA Control Panel doesn't care about a program's date of publishing, because it can't figure that information out.

It's strange that few people recommend Adaptive Mode. What can you say about this parameter? Can it improve performance in games on a laptop?

If they're instead always recommending Maximum Performance, then I feel these people found one setting that somehow worked for them and figured it was the "root cause" of their issue without actually trying to find the root cause of their issue. I've had several laptops with switchable graphics and I don't recall any of them having issues with performance.

In any case, for a laptop, Adaptive Mode isn't any better than Optimal Mode if the options exist. Optimal Mode, if my cursory research on the interwebs tells me, is the GPU doesn't re-render frames if nothing happened.