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DPS is available on XBOX Series consoles only. It has no effect on earlier XBOX consoles.
Dynamic Power States (DPS) dynamically adjusts the GPU’s power level based on the rendering workload. When the GPU isn’t fully utilized, DPS scales the power state back — conserving energy without compromising performance. The graphics driver drives the adjustment automatically, based on recent frame-time history. Without DPS the GPU is locked at power state P4, meaning even an idle GPU draws more power than necessary. DPS unlocks lower power states (P0–P3) whenever the workload allows.

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How it works

  1. The game enables GPU dynamic power states.
  2. The GPU calculates normalized frame statistics and stores them as historical data.
  3. The GPU automatically changes power states based on current demand and history, saving energy.
Games can reduce energy consumption further by adopting the rest of the XBOX Sustainability Toolkit.

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Case studies

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Call of Duty: Black Ops 6

Rulon Raymond, Senior Director of Technology for Call of Duty:
We spent a few days experimenting with DPS and the results were promising. Specifically, we could see an additional 10–15% power savings in areas beyond those we introduced using the XBOX Sustainability Toolkit. We were already throttling parts of the game engine down (for example, while in menus or front-end screens), with no change to the players’ framerates, which saved us a lot of power — but DPS allowed us to get additional savings with no effort.
At shipping, the Black Ops 6 team’s plan:
  • Enable DPS in all areas where power-saving measures were already applied.
  • Expose a flag to enable DPS at all times, off by default, while multi-day performance testing continues.

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Two Point Museum

Ben Hymers, Technical Director and co-founder of Two Point Studios, shipped DPS via a cloud setting managed by the XBOX team — without a code change:
We tested Dynamic Power States alongside Constrained+ mode to maximise energy efficiency. Together, these features reduced power draw by approximately 50–58% in the main menu and cut energy use during constrained mode by 39–63%. Since rollout, we’ve observed a notable decrease in average energy consumption without degrading gameplay fidelity. For instance, power consumption for XBOX Series X has decreased from an average of 135 W to 125 W. Across our player base, this translates to an annual energy saving of ~6.5 megawatt-hours, equivalent to watching TV nonstop for 65,000 hours, or nearly 7.5 years straight.
Two Point Museum was the first third-party studio to adopt DPS remotely via cloud configuration.

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Test DPS without changing code (development only)

You can enable DPS globally on a devkit without rebuilding your title:
1

Update your devkit

Ensure your devkit has at least the August 2024 Recovery installed.
2

Create the flag file

Create an empty file named DynamicPowerEnable on your PC.
3

Copy it to the console D: drive

4

Launch and profile

Launch your game. DPS is now active.
5

Disable DPS when done

Relaunch the game.

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Watch DPS in real time

Enable the Title Performance Overlay via PIX or the console’s settings in XBOX Manager.
  • If DPS is enabled, the overlay includes a red line and a GPU power state metric (0–4) in the bottom-right. 4 means full speed; lower means saving energy.
  • If DPS is disabled, the GPU power state shows N/A.
Use PIX’s Power Load % metric to measure changes in GPU energy usage in specific parts of the game.
Titles cannot use the DynamicPowerEnable file to enable DPS in retail. For retail releases, use SetDriverHintX (below).

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Enable DPS in your game (retail)

Use the existing SetDriverHintX() API on the graphics device.

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API

With the June 2024 GDK or later, use the enum:
For pre-June 2024 GDKs (or older XDK titles), use the value directly:

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Enable DPS

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Disable DPS

DPS can be toggled during gameplay, but leaving it enabled at all times gives the maximum savings.
If your game toggles DPS, reset the desired value in the PLM Resume() handler. DPS state is not preserved across Suspend/Resume.

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Detect DPS at runtime with frame statistics

Games can query frame statistics to make rendering decisions (dynamic resolution, etc.) based on DPS behavior.

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GetFrameStatisticsX

A new frame-statistics type is available:
And its associated structure:
The existing D3D12XBOX_RENDER_STATISTICS returns GPUBusyDuration:
GPUBusyDuration is normalized — it assumes the GPU clock is at P4 and is invariant of the current power state. The power-scaling frame statistics are subject to power-state changes and will differ from GPUBusyDuration.

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Example

A GPU workload that takes 8 ms at P4 extends to 12 ms at P2 (lower clock):
The normalized GPUBusyDuration is preserved because game engines use it for dynamic resolution computations. Separating normalized and scaled measurements avoids feedback loops where a lower power state causes dynamic resolution to keep dropping until the lowest is reached.

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Next steps

Last modified on August 3, 2026

Related topics

XBOX Game Energy Efficiency EssentialsSustainability overviewSustainability profiling with PIXBalancing performance and power efficiencyMeasure power consumption with your devkit