Background story: I recently bought a computer with AMD 7000 series CPU and GPU.

amdgpu_top reports 15 ~ 20 watts in normal desktop usage, but as soon as I have video playing in VLC, it goes to 45 watts constantly which is undesirable behavior especially in summer. (I hope that is just reporting issue… but my computer is hot)

When I do DRI_PRIME=1 vlc and then play videos, amdgpu_top doesn’t report the power surge. (I have iGPU enabled)

Is there anything more convenient then modifying individual .desktop files? KDE malfunctions when I put export DRI_PRIME=1 in .xprofile so that’s a no go.

Solved: removing mesa related hardware acceleration package makes VLC fall back to libplacebo which doesn’t do these weird things.

  • axzxc1236OP
    1·
    1 year ago

    Through some more testing, I found out mesa related hardware acceleration package can cause these power surge, on Archlinux it includes mesa-vdpau and libva-mesa-driver.

    If I don’t have these package installed, VLC reverts to libplacebo which doesn’t seem to cause more power usage.