Now, it’s tempting to hit up the driver’s global settings and set the power management mode to the aforementioned value and never think about it again. As the name suggests, this setting will run your card at its maximum clocks all the time. Newer NVIDIA cards feature several more options, such as “NVIDIA driver-controlled” and “Prefer consistent performance”, but the only other choice you need to worry about is “Prefer maximum performance”.
However, Optimal Power adds another feature - it’ll stop the GPU rendering a new frame if nothing has changed on screen and instead reuse what’s already in the framebuffer. Both options will modulate the core and memory clock speeds and voltage of your GPU, increasing them during times of load and decreasing them when demand is low. Optimal power superseded the previous default, called “Adaptive”. This setting was introduced into the company’s video drivers with the GTX 1080, specifically version 368.22 release in May 2016. By default, NVIDIA sets the power management mode of your GPU (be it in card or laptop form) to “Optimal power”.
