High idle power/heat on passed through GPU

I am a total Linux noob who wanted to switch because I’ve grown to dislike Windows more and more over the years, but I still wanted to game natively in Windows and virtualisation is a [mostly] fun project. I’m using Kubuntu, QEMU/KVM and blah-blah everything is working great and I’ve been gaming with my buddies no problem.

I use a GTX 1050Ti as my “Linux GPU” and an RTX 2080 as my VM GPU, when the VM is off and I’m using Linux, I noticed that my 2080’s fans were spinning, then I touched the back of it and it was very hot to the touch (I’d say around 50-55c or so, enough to make the 1050Ti actually spin up it’s fans periodically) and the power consumption of the house has gone up a bit. When I launch the VM and all the Windows drivers load, the card acts as you would normally expect - fans are off, temperature is low, power usage is low, idling. Shut down the VM, and bam, it warms up, the fans spin, repeat.

Googling has been pretty perilous and as I’m a complete noobie learning the ropes there isn’t much I can think of aside from reinstalling Kubuntu with just my 2080 and going the Lutris/WINE/[Steam]Proton route, but I really don’t want to do that. As far as I’m understanding vfio is supposed to force your passed through GPU into its lowest power/idle state while VMs aren’t running, and I believe that it isn’t for whatever reason, so I’m hoping you guys could help me out here. Thanks for reading!

Edit: My CPU and Mobo are a Ryzen 3700X and an MSI MEG X570 UNIFY.

My experience with nvidia GPUs (nothing as spendy as a 2080) is that power usage is lower with the VM running and the driver loaded than when bound to vfio and shutdown.

I don’t know what vfio does but I kind of doubt it has the same level of granularity of power options that a proper GPU driver does.