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Maybe but you're discounting the energy required to send those 99% of pixels over the network. Just because it's not your CPU doesn't mean it's not doing work.

Indeed, in the case of LTE comms and mobile chips the difference in power usage is greater than six orders of magnitude.

Or maybe lower since less data is transmitted?

> So they're trading bandwidth for CPU load at either end

Given it's Nvidia I would imagine it's more likely going to be GPU load rather than CPU load. Don't underestimate the current computational overhead of existing lossy video compression.