Playing Madden NFL 11, the popular EA Sports video game, consumes roughly six times more electricity on the Sony PlayStation 3 and the Microsoft Xbox 360 than on the Nintendo Wii, according to engineers at the institute’s lab in Knoxville, Tenn. The Wii drew an average of 13.7 watts vs. 84.8 watts for the PlayStation and 87.9 for the Xbox. (The figures do not count the TV screens that the boxes must be connected to.)
To calculate what this adds up to over the course of a year, the engineers drew on a 2006 estimate by the Nielsen Company that heavy users play for five hours and 45 minutes a day. That puts the Wii’s consumption in the range of 29 kilowatt hours, which the engineers compared to that of a fluorescent light fixture with two four-foot tubes. The consumptions of the PlayStation, at 179 kilowatt hours, and the Xbox, at 184 kilowatt-hours, were akin to a washing machine’s or a television set’s.
The Xbox and the PlayStation “are very powerful computing units that have powerful graphics cards and powerful processors, and it takes a lot more power to run things like that,’’ said Jeffrey A. Dols, a project manager at the lab. “The Wii is much less powerful.’’
In fact, in the Madden game, the players have recognizable faces on the PlayStation and the Xbox; on the Wii, the images are “more cartoony,’’ he said.
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