Universal BlueUB
Universal Blue•10mo ago
Atilo

90W+ power usage on nvidia gpu when doing nothing

I'm running bazzite-gnome-nvidia-open on my desktop and i'm seeing considerable power draw/usage in Mission Center/nvidia-smi.
This is the case, even if i close everything and the only thing left running is a terminal inside gnome.

Here's my nvidia-smi output:
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| NVIDIA-SMI 570.86.16              Driver Version: 570.86.16      CUDA Version: 12.8     |
|-----------------------------------------+------------------------+----------------------+
| GPU  Name                 Persistence-M | Bus-Id          Disp.A | Volatile Uncorr. ECC |
| Fan  Temp   Perf          Pwr:Usage/Cap |           Memory-Usage | GPU-Util  Compute M. |
|                                         |                        |               MIG M. |
|=========================================+========================+======================|
|   0  NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080        Off |   00000000:01:00.0  On |                  N/A |
| 48%   59C    P0             90W /  340W |     532MiB /  10240MiB |      0%      Default |
|                                         |                        |                  N/A |
+-----------------------------------------+------------------------+----------------------+
                                                                                         
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Processes:                                                                              |
|  GPU   GI   CI              PID   Type   Process name                        GPU Memory |
|        ID   ID                                                               Usage      |
|=========================================================================================|
|    0   N/A  N/A           96252      G   /usr/bin/gnome-shell                    448MiB |
|    0   N/A  N/A           96790      G   /usr/bin/Xwayland                         4MiB |
|    0   N/A  N/A          601832    C+G   /usr/bin/ptyxis                          32MiB |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+

To me, as a beginner, it seems like the problem is that the gpu is constantly in P0 but i'm not sure how to adjust that.
A few other things i've noticed are that gpu usage can be unexpectedly high (~40%) even when viewing animated websites like https://autoeq.app/
and that suspending the computer won't work sometimes where i have to force the power off or wait ~5 mins for it to turn back on and then suspend again.

Thanks in advance!
AutoEq
Automatic headphone equalization
Solution
Update if anyone has the same problem.
I'm not sure which of these fixed it but here is what i did:
  • plugging two of my monitors into my motherboard (iGPU) instead of the 3080
  • setting power preference to normal inside Nvidia Control Panel on Windows
  • setting switchable dynamic graphics inside the Advanced Power Profile options to Prefer Performance instead of Maximum Performance (also on Windows)
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