He's not wrong.

They also emit real photons. 🤯
- Yep, virtual lights work the same as real lights
  
  If they’re not looked at, they don’t consume as much electricity. So there’s that difference.
  
  Virtual lights are real lights...
- Nah, fuck that. Buys e-ink monitor
  
  They would still emit real photons, just reflected ones.

And by convention, all vehicles in video games are electric.
- technically they all make fake combustion noises, which is worse.
  
  Why? I like combustion noises
  
  Why? I like combustion noises

Which is really unexpected if you're looking at an oil lamp.
- Change electricity to energy and we’re good again

More interestingly, lamps in video games use the same amount of real electricity if they are on or off.
- Not necessarily, on OLED displays (which are definitely a thing for desktop computers and TVs) a light that's turned off is using less power because the pixels the lamp is displayed on (and the ones around it too) are dimmer.
  
  YELLS IN GPU VERTEX PIPELINE
  that consumes electricity. ever think about the poor gpu? about how your words hurt its feelings?
  jokes aside the power to process a few hundred vertices every frame is insignificant
  
  And traditional LCDs with a backlight use more power for darkness. The LCD is transparent by default and turns opaque/black when a voltage is applied.
  
  Actually, the pixels go completely black and do not consume any electricity at all in that state.
  You might be thinking of early OLEDs, which had to stay on at all times to prevent blur/smearing. But panel manufacturers solved that problem a few years ago. Don't remember exactly when the change happened, but I remember first seeing true black OLEDs sometime around 2017/2018.
  
  OLED displays (which are definitely a thing for desktop computers and TVs)
  Probably not for most people, due to cost. More realistic for portable devices where battery saving is a thing, as it doesn't seem like there's much mainstream push for OLED (or similar equivalent) monitors that aren't top-end (on newegg, I could only find 240Hz options).
  That and often search results are for other panel technologies (IPS/TN/VA). Lower spec stuff seems to exist but you really gotta scrape the bottom of the barrel (portable monitors) to find some niche product.
- Highly depends on the rendering engine and if you’re looking at it, as it could unrender if you look away, meaning less energy used.

Did you know that if we took all the rhinos left on the planet, put them in a rocket ship and launched it towards the sun, the would travel 91.511 million mi, and die along the way?
- Akshually we currently have no rocket with enough power to launch that much mass towards the Sun. People always assume because the Sun has a lot of gravity, stuff moves toward it automatically. But when launching from Earth that's not the case. Earth is in orbit around the Sun, in order to get to the Sun you need to lose all that energy. Since rhino's are heavy af you'd need a mighty rocket indeed.
  We could with some effort maybe launch one small rhino, say 600-700kg towards the Sun. And it requires some fancy ass orbital mechanics. So it would travel way more than 91.511 million miles before ending up in the Sun. This rhino would probably not survive the launch, which is just as well given its destination and travel time.
  
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  While getting a rocket or probe to hit the sun smack in the middle sounds hard to do, you can get obliterated by it with much less delta-v.
  You need to get to the Earth's escape velocity and just cleverly align the angle of escape so that you get an eccentric enough heliocentric orbit that you'd end up some 6 million kms close to the sun. Anything closer than that is literally overkill.
  
  Also we don't launch towards the sun, we deorbit by burning in the opposite direction of where the earth is moving towards.

So an oil lamp in a video game is actually an electric lamp?

Shades in video games use even more electricity
- Not on OLED screens + prebaked lightning
  
  That's too specific conditions, but okay :)

Even if the lamps are off.

If you're using an older LCD screen, turning off the lamp uses more electricity than leaving it on

Playing a fireplace video produces real heat.
- I guess if you disable the computer's fan, yes.
  
  Greetings fellow time-traveler. What model of entropy-reversing computer fan do you use?

If the game is demanding enough they also consume the same amount of electricity, maybe even more.

Every electronic device in the game uses real electricity. Even if it's not on.

But what about candles?

We should demand that they are oil lamps from now on to save the planet
- Just make the player stumble in pitch black darkness through the entire game, duh.

So do stones in video games. And water.
- You aren't supposed to think about it

Unless they are unloaded out of memory

Lamps in video games aren't real. It's the video game that's using the electricity.
- Video games aren't real. It's the computer components that use electricity
  
  computer components aren't real. It's all just tiny gremlins doing maths really fast and turning pixels on and off
- That's like saying "lamps don't create light, it's the flame/filament in the lamp that creates the light"
- The lamp is rendered by small electric lights, be it LEDs or LCD. CRTs are in a bit of an grey area. But you can absolutely use a monitor as a light source by itself .

somebody said this at work yesterday, and now it's here

Mind blow

Why can't we shoot lights out anymore?

Wait, video games use electricity?

Schmidt?

Do they use more than dark places in video games? Like if you are in dark room in the game, and you turn on a lamp in the game, are you using more electricity?
My guess is no but I am not a programmer or electrician nor a physicist.
- if you have an oled display, then if a video game is brighter it costs more energy because the LEDs turn on more.
  if have an lcd display, there's a backlight that always has the same brightness and crystals blocking the light, which makes the image. meaning a brighter scene doesn't take more power, since the backlight doesn't use more energy.
  
  On an LCD display, the backlight is always on but the crystals need power to align and let the backlight through.
  A full white screen would in theory use more electricity than a full black screen. How much more, I don't actually know but I would like to know more info in it.
- I'd guess if you have an OLED panel it would because black pixels are 'off' it would consume somewhat of more electricity but I do not know
- If the light is not dynamic at all, no. If it has stuff like dynamic shadows it will require more processing power to render frames than if the light was off, which probably makes the CPU/GPU draw slightly more power

And are full of untold mathematical horrors, just like physical lamps.

Solar powered

- What is this mythical video game system that doesn't use power itself?

I'd argue that's not true if the lighting is baked into the map.
- Does it matter? The screen still has to display it, and GPU render it, even if no RT is involved.
  
  The GPU renders the map no matter if there is lighting baked in our not. It's exactly the same operation. And depending on your display tech, brighter pixels might actually use slightly less energy.

So does every other pixel in the game
- thatsthejoke.jpg

Nuclear powerplants in video games generate real electricity