Increased idle consumption with driver 570

I have several graphics card and use a 3080ti for render offload. In the past year or so, the power consumption reported by nvidia-smi at idle was 7w for the card, and the temperature was usually below 40 degrees.

Drivers were updated on the cuda repo today or yesterday. Since installing the new version (570.86.10) the idle consumption has increased from 7 to 18w and the temperature is now around 50 degrees, which is I think the minimum temperature for the fans to switch on.

There’s absolutely nothing running on the card, at least until I launch a steam game, and I don’t think anything else has changed in my setup.

Fri Jan 24 19:23:23 2025       
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| NVIDIA-SMI 570.86.10              Driver Version: 570.86.10      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 Ti     On  |   00000000:01:00.0 Off |                  N/A |
|  0%   44C    P8             18W /  400W |       2MiB /  12288MiB |      0%      Default |
|                                         |                        |                  N/A |
+-----------------------------------------+------------------------+----------------------+
                                                                                         
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Processes:                                                                              |
|  GPU   GI   CI              PID   Type   Process name                        GPU Memory |
|        ID   ID                                                               Usage      |
|=========================================================================================|
|  No running processes found                                                             |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+

it’s not easy to return to the 565 driver to make a test; apt install cuda-drivers-565 actually drags the 570 version of packages anyway.

I spent a fun few minutes and downgraded manually to 565. I can confirm power consumption is back to 7-8 watts

Fri Jan 24 19:55:56 2025       
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| NVIDIA-SMI 565.57.01              Driver Version: 565.57.01      CUDA Version: 12.7     |
|-----------------------------------------+------------------------+----------------------+
| 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 Ti     Off |   00000000:01:00.0 Off |                  N/A |
|  0%   47C    P8              8W /  400W |       2MiB /  12288MiB |      0%      Default |
|                                         |                        |                  N/A |
+-----------------------------------------+------------------------+----------------------+
                                                                                         
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Processes:                                                                              |
|  GPU   GI   CI        PID   Type   Process name                              GPU Memory |
|        ID   ID                                                               Usage      |
|=========================================================================================|
|  No running processes found                                                             |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+

Is gsync / vrr / fresync enabled by any chance? idk if these features are even available on laptops, but having vrr enabled on my desktop causes much higher power usage on idle

Does the same happen in Wayland, I see you’re running X.
Because on my RTX 4070, the idle usage hasn’t changed.

I am on wayland. I have excluded the nvidia card from KWin, there’s no monitor connected to it, and the card is truly unused until I boot up something that uses render offload (e.g. using a Steam game set up to use the nvidia card using env variables).
these are the temperatures on the machine after a couple of minutes, using driver 565

image

Obviously if I start to run something, the temperatures start to climb up (60/70+ degrees) and then go down to 35 degrees. When using driver 570, the temperature climbs to 49 degrees and does not go down.

1 Like

Not sure what I had previously in temps but 12W power usage is the same.

I have a desktop machine so I’m only using the Nvidia GPU.

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I was searching about why there was another driver release today and found this thread… sure enough, I also noticed higher temperatures since I installed last Friday’s (UTC+8) driver and my power consumption was 18W (on a laptop 3070 that’s totally idle because I only use it for compute).

During last update I noticed they changed the modprobe.d/nvidia.conf by removing the line: options nvidia NVreg_DynamicPowerManagement=0x02 but I had put it back while trying to understand why my system was crashing at boot (turned out to be a failure to update the initramdisk, or what it’s called now since I use dracut to manage TPM2 encrypted disk unlock).
I just tried removing that line and rebooting and I see lower power consumption at idle and my temp. at idle is now almost 10°C lower.

I see 570.86.15 was just published over 570.86.10, trying that one out. I will also check the module configuration.

[edit] first boot, consumption is elevated (17W) with the new driver. nvtop mentions the GPU runs at lowest clock speed

Device 2 [NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Ti]           PCIe GEN 1@16
GPU 210MHz  MEM 405MHz  TEMP  33°C FAN   0% POW  17 / 200 W

but on driver 565, the GPU frequency could drop to 0. Trying to change the config file now.

[edit] no luck, I didn’t find any setting that would make power consumption go down.

I also made a mistake earlier, the GPU clock doesn’t go down to 0 on driver 565

GPU 210MHz  MEM 405MHz  TEMP  39°C FAN   0% POW   7 / 200 W

the GPU reports less consumption but with the same frequencies.

Idle speculation on why this, (Increased idle consumption with driver 570), may have occurred.

Driver 570 does not seem to be available through the Nvidia.com drivers page and was released with Cuda Toolkit 12.8, to support Blackwell.

Perhaps the newer, more aggressive power management features of Blackwell, have had the undesired effects you’re seeing on older cards and hopefully will be worked around soon. Details starting on page 31 here.

1 Like

the temperature increase is not really indicative here, I booted my computer with driver 570 first and checked multiple parameters which lead to the temperature slowly increasing.

I then switched to driver 565 and while the card consumed less power, it was already hotter at that point (that was literally not a cold boot).
If I keep my computer on, idle for several hours, then driver 565 temperature is 37 degrees.

Same with driver 570 gives me a temperature of 49 degrees.

The most reliable difference is just the extra 10 watts.

I did notice the 570 driver is not on the website yet, I am a bit disappointed that people using the debian repository got a new driver pushed that is neither beta nor new version (and not stable either, obviously) the default driver should have stayed at 565 unless people opt-in for beta/new feature drivers

Driver has been posted and this also works for geforce series → Driver Details | NVIDIA

Proof that it is BS that the driver is for datacenter only:

Well i can’t complain at all, if my system is idle the temperature goes down as it should. Running 570.86.15 at the moment.

No issues at all idle.

Similar issue here - just upgraded to driver 570, and idle power consumption is higher than normal. Usually around 16W, now tending to sit at 20-21W. This is on a laptop:
Device 0 [NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Ti Laptop GPU] PCIe GEN 1@ 8x RX: 400.0 KiB/s TX: 400.0 KiB/s
GPU 210MHz MEM 405MHz TEMP 47°C FAN N/A% POW 21 / 130 W

Note: The desktop uses the integrated graphics for display. The RTX is used purely for compute. Have not rolled back to 565 yet to confirm.

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From what I can see, everyone that’s affected is using an RTX 3000 series GPu?

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I have not rolled back… but if I suspend / resume (as per earlier posts), the power consumption jumps up briefly (along with the speed) before settling back down to the “normal” idle 15W.

it’s over 30W in my case:

$ nvidia-smi 
Thu Jan 30 12:04:32 2025       
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| NVIDIA-SMI 570.86.15              Driver Version: 570.86.15      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 3090        Off |   00000000:0B:00.0  On |                  N/A |
|  0%   45C    P8             33W /  370W |      34MiB /  24576MiB |      0%      Default |
|                                         |                        |                  N/A |
+-----------------------------------------+------------------------+----------------------+
                                                                                         
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Processes:                                                                              |
|  GPU   GI   CI              PID   Type   Process name                        GPU Memory |
|        ID   ID                                                               Usage      |
|=========================================================================================|
|  No running processes found                                                             |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+

…but it’s comparing to ~20W I have in 565:

Thu Jan 30 12:17:57 2025       
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| NVIDIA-SMI 565.57.01              Driver Version: 565.57.01      CUDA Version: 12.7     |
|-----------------------------------------+------------------------+----------------------+
| 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 3090        Off |   00000000:0B:00.0 Off |                  N/A |
|  0%   46C    P8             22W /  370W |      34MiB /  24576MiB |      0%      Default |
|                                         |                        |                  N/A |
+-----------------------------------------+------------------------+----------------------+
                                                                                         
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Processes:                                                                              |
|  GPU   GI   CI        PID   Type   Process name                              GPU Memory |
|        ID   ID                                                               Usage      |
|=========================================================================================|
|  No running processes found                                                             |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+

Temps are the same, i would worry more about increased temps then a few wattage.

Guess I’m an odd one out. With a 3080 and 565, my idle usage was ~30 watts. With 570, it’s still ~30 watts. This is from driving 3 monitors(1440p, 2x 1080p, all 120hz). Maybe the difference is only really seen when draw was lower in the first place.