Arch Linux

frukt

Member

Registered: 2008-12-12

Posts: 14

Nvidia GPU power consumption and nvidia-smi accuracy

Hi all,

I recently updated my Arch system (Dell XPS 15 7590, Nvidia GTX 1650 GPU) to kernel 5.9 + nvidia 455.38 and at first it got me alarmed about the GPU's power consumption. nvidia-smi consistently reports P-state P3 and ~12W power drain without any processes using the GPU (I use PRIME offloading on the rare occasions I wish to make use of the discrete GPU). Driver ver 440.82 generally reported P8 / ~1W as might be expected. Yet the actual battery discharge rate (as reported by powertop or multiplying /sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/{current_now,voltage_now}) is way lower than what's reported by nvidia-smi for the GPU alone (4-6W in idle and light loads).

Perhaps anyone more knowledgeable can shed light on whether nvidia-smi simply reports untrustworthy figures or there's actually cause for concern.