After updating to 555, no application is able to go above 25-30w of consumption. My power rating is set to 170w.
A game like World of Warcraft shows the GPU in [Low Power] mode. Nothing I do pushes the GPU beyond this low power band, its behaving like its in low power mode despite my nvidia-smi output saying the contrary.
Timestamp : Sat Jun 1 13:54:13 2024
Driver Version : 555.42.02
CUDA Version : 12.5
Attached GPUs : 1
GPU 00000000:26:00.0
GPU Power Readings
Power Draw : 18.92 W
Current Power Limit : 170.00 W
Requested Power Limit : 170.00 W
Default Power Limit : 170.00 W
Min Power Limit : 100.00 W
Max Power Limit : 187.00 W
Power Samples
Duration : 3.68 sec
Number of Samples : 119
Max : 22.54 W
Min : 18.80 W
Avg : 20.07 W
GPU Memory Power Readings
I tested this further by loading World of Warcraft and Minecraft while running watch nvidia-smi -q -d POWER. It peaked at 22w, as shown by the report output above.
Essentially, any game that uses the GPU under Wayland and version 555 experiences severe frame hitching and low performance. I still have poor performance under X11 and 555, but I at least can get a stable framerate.
Here’s a view of nvtop under load:
