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rafradek

Member

Registered: 2023-10-24

Posts: 2

[SOLVED] High gpu usage of plasma desktop and KWin

I have noticed that plasmashell and kwin consumes a lot of gpu usage just by itself, even if the compositor is disabled (but to a lesser degree). Kinda as shown here

+---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| NVIDIA-SMI 535.113.01             Driver Version: 535.113.01   CUDA Version: 12.2     |
|-----------------------------------------+----------------------+----------------------+
| 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 GTX 1660 Ti     Off | 00000000:29:00.0  On |                  N/A |
| 27%   45C    P0              27W / 120W |    665MiB /  6144MiB |     40%      Default |
|                                         |                      |                  N/A |
+-----------------------------------------+----------------------+----------------------+
                                                                                         
+---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+ 

nvidia-smi pmon shows results like this:

 Idx           #   C/G     %      %      %      %    name
    0     324190     G      -      -      -      -    Xorg           
    0     324263     G      -      -      -      -    kwalletd5      
    0     324327     G      -      -      -      -    ksmserver      
    0     324331     G      -      -      -      -    kded5          
    0     324332     G      -      -      -      -    kwin_x11       
    0     324369     G     33     12      -      -    plasmashell    
    0     324418     G      -      -      -      -    polkit-kde-auth
    0     324423     G      -      -      -      -    xdg-desktop-por
    0     324574     G      -      -      -      -    kclockd        
    0     324576     G      -      -      -      -    kdeconnectd    
    0     324600     G      -      -      -      -    kaccess        
    0     324613     G      -      -      -      -    DiscoverNotifi 

The display is 1440p 144Hz. Plasma is 5.27.8
Now i wonder if its perfectly normal for kde to consume a great deal of gpu, considering that other environments do not have this issue.

Last edited by rafradek (2023-10-24 12:42:41)

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 25,285

Re: [SOLVED] High gpu usage of plasma desktop and KWin

Do you have a bunch of system monitor applets/plasmoids? Does the usage disappear if you disable them?

rafradek

Member

Registered: 2023-10-24

Posts: 2

Re: [SOLVED] High gpu usage of plasma desktop and KWin

Not sure how did you guess it right (tell me), but re adding the monitor plasmoid fixed it. Is this some sort of a bug that i should report to KDE?

Last edited by rafradek (2023-10-24 12:45:42)

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 25,285

Re: [SOLVED] High gpu usage of plasma desktop and KWin

If it was an old config then that might have used the older framework that got rewritten at some point (don't remember exactly when 5.20 or somesuch). The older versions of those were known to cause a memory leak in GPU resources. Afaik those should be fixed assuming you're using the newer implementations. But in any case the monitor applets have historically been the cause of such issues so they were a safe first bet.