Based on some estimates I've done, PC gaming uses far more energy than GPU-based crypto mining as a whole.

I mostly did this out of pure curiosity, and because people love fishing for confirmation bias against crypto.

Everything here is subject to huge variables and may not be correct. But mostly I'm trying to create the best case scenario in the favor of PC gaming.

So let's start by looking at the most popular and profitable GPU-mined cryptocurrency, Ethereum. The current total hashrate of Ethereum as of typing this is 568.58 TH/s (Terahash per Second) or the equivalent of 568,580,000 megahashes per second.

Using the RTX3070 as the example card here. Which mines Ethereum at roughly 60MH/s, the total hashrate of Ethereum is roughly the equivalent of 9,476,333 RTX 3070 cards running constantly.

Using my own 3070 Mining Rig and whattomine's estimates as a general idea of the power consumption of a single RTX3070 card it comes to a median of around 130watts of constant power. So let's multiply that 130 watts by the total number of RTX3070 cards it would take to equal Ethereum's hashrate. And you get 1,231,923,290 watts of constant power or 1.232 Gigawatts of constant energy. Again there's a lot of variables here, some cards are less efficient than a 3070, some are more. It's impossible to know which cards most are using. For the hell of it we will round a the way up to 1.4 Gigawatts of power.

So how do we calculate how much power PC gaming is using? Well let's try to be fair by using insanely conservative estimates. Doing some research it would seem the average gaming PC uses between 300-500 watts of power when being used. So let's meet at the middle at say 400 watts of constant power during usage.

So people don't run their gaming PCs 24/7 so how can we calculate how many people are running their PCs at any given time? Well I decided to use Steams own concurrent users chart. Which estimates about 16 million users at the slowest part of the day and around 25 million at the busiest. But for the sake or argument let's go with the lowest figure of 16 million concurrent users. Now let's also assume 75% of those people just have steam logged into the background and aren't actually playing any games. Again for the sake or proving a point That still leaves us with 4 million people actively playing games.

This actually seems fair, when you go to Steam Charts, you can add up the concurrent actual active players of just the top 20 games alone and get anywhere between 1.5-4 million players easily. So let's assume they are all using on average 400 watts of constant power gaming, with the total number of people playing games never falling below 4 million at the slowest part of the day. You end up with 1,600,000,000 watts of constant power or 1.6 Gigawatts. 200 Megawatts more than our Ethereum/RTX3070 estimate.

So let's take it a step further, and look at the second most profitable GPU-mining coin, Ravencoin. The total hashrate for this coin is only equivalent to 159,000 RTX 3070 cards running at 27mhs for KAWPOW algorithm, barely a drop in the ocean compared to Ethereum. Even at the 180 watts of power an RTX 3070 uses for the KAWPOW algorithm, we are only adding 28.6 more Megawatts of power for GPU mining.

To make this even more insane is some of the biggest most popular games aren't even playable on Steam, such as Warzone, League of Legends, Overwatch, ect. It's hard to know just exactly how many people are PC gaming at any given time. Or what it's like during worst case scenario hours.

It's crazy how much power consumption gaming uses and no one even thinks about it, because it's something people love doing, myself included.