Not wild nor weird but interesting observations of yours nevertheless. So thanks for sharing.
I have the theory that both Nvidia & AMD cheap out (because they can as their audience is mostly unaware) on their HW design (even though GPUs these days are expensive items).
Apple’s ARM SoCs seemingly care a bit more for their users. I recall each output has its own independent “display controller” and capable of variable refresh rates.
I would try variable refresh rates if supported on your monitors and display outputs. In my opinion, VRRs are going to find more uses than gaming for people with efficient compute in their mentality.
Did you try to disable GPU scheduling, as suggested earlier? It will cause frame scheduling to be moved from the GPU to the CPU and thus reduce the workload on the GPU.
Two of my displays do support G-Sync so I have it enabled on those for VRR. During my troubleshooting I did try toggling it off but that did not change any behavior with regard to power usage.
I have not. I’ll need to test that and see if it changes anything. Right now as I type this my GPU is using 30W which is already a big improvement. I’m not sure if it would be worth keeping hardware accelerated scheduling turned off in this case?
It’s a simple toggle but you have to restart for it to take effect. I just tested the hardware GPU scheduling setting this evening and it did not make any difference on the behavior of the idle power usage.
I think G-sync support outside PC games doesn’t exist. Pretty much the same for FreeSync (though which is loyalty free).
I think VRR support requires work from applications and better yet from operating systems. Even on MacOS, it’s considered pioneering effort at the moment. Sadly I’m afraid the PC side will have to wait for a long long while.
This is a problem with Linux as well. Known bug that has survived driver updates. Nvidia has said they fixed the issue in the Linux 515 driver but this post suggests it’s not. I have this problem too.
I know your post was about windows, just sharing that it appears to be wider spread and it’s being looked at. Hope at least it provides some comfort you’re not alone.
It is normal for a GPU to consume power even when idle, as it needs to maintain its state and be ready for when a task is assigned to it. However, the RTX 3080 is a high-end GPU and its idle power usage of 75-80W is higher than usual.
One possible cause of the high idle power usage could be the connected displays. The GPU may be sending a signal to all three displays even when they are not in use, which can consume power. You can try disconnecting one or more displays to see if it reduces the idle power usage.
Another thing you can try is to check for any background tasks or processes that may be consuming GPU resources. You can use the Task Manager or a system monitoring tool to check for any high GPU usage from background processes.
Lastly, you can also try updating your GPU drivers to the latest version, as newer drivers may include power management improvements and bug fixes.
It is expected that the GPU usage drops to 5W or so when the displays turn off, it seems to be working as it should.