It appears that on windows, alt-tabbing, opening the start menu, switching active windows, etc frequently cause a dGPU wakeup regardless of power modes/settings. When the dGPU wakes up, it results in a slow increase in overall battery drain of around 10W then a subsequent slow decrease back to original. This cycle takes between 45 seconds and 2 minutes to complete, resulting in a absolutely monumental impact to battery life.
I’ve eliminated as many variables as possible, including turning off windows’ desktop animations, adjusting power modes, making sure there was nothing unnecessary running in the background, etc. Sometimes the laptop seems to get into a state where these actions don’t wake the GPU for a while, but eventually it comes right back.
This bug is this difference between getting 5+ hours of battery life and getting 2-2.5 hours–it is a massive issue.
(bottom left is the dGPU, note that not every wakeup is caught by hwinfo, the first one was missed, the second was caught). The charge rate in the middle-left shows the massive impact).
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Yeah, this is a windows specific problem that is affecting all hybrid systems including Intel + Nvidia. It’s not framework or AMD specific.
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On my old intel razer with an nvidia rtx 3080, I don’t recall having wakeups from alt+tabbing or start menu access. I also don’t think it had such a profound effect on power utilization for 45 seconds or more.
I think one thing that was throwing me off a bit is that I believe the “charge rate” is smoothed over about a 20 second window–I tested this by turning brightness between max and minimum, and observed a smooth increase/decrease instead of a jump. This indicates that the wakeups are just very high power use spikes which are getting averaged over a long period of time.
It does appear that hwinfo has a mode to not wake the dGPU, which is helping me get more accurate information–but it seems like there’s just something going on in either the driver or windows that causes the wakeups sometimes, but not at others. I’m going to keep monitoring it and looking for patterns.
It’s just crazy to me that if we can solve this issue, the laptop could gain 2+ hours of battery life with no real drawback.
I don’t like linking reddit, but read this thread:
https://www.reddit.com/r/AMDLaptops/comments/vdwt7u/dgpu_being_woken_by_windows_on_battery_constantly/
You’ll notice complaints coming from both AMD and Intel+Nvidia users. It something in Windows. Completely clearing drivers and trying with original drivers etc, doesn’t work.
I hope it’s not a necro to reply here, but this exact issue is killing my battery life too. I’m replying here instead of making a new thread because the problem is flatly identical - switching active window, alt-tabbing, opening the start menu, etc. Is there really just no solution?
Make sure that in hwinfo settings you’ve disabled the option to wake GPUs. That will definitely cause the issue, but it’s not the only cause. Additionally, if the GPU is awake at the time you launch hwinfo, then hwinfo may poll it occasionally, waking it up briefly. In short, if you see the dGPU in the hwinfo sensor data, close and reopen hwinfo.
Beyond that, I’ve also noticed sometimes where there’s nothing obvious waking it up (looking at task manager and hwinfo), but it appears to be getting woken up anyway. I’ve been able to resolve this temporarily by rebooting, but inevidibly, it will occur again eventually and I’ll have to reboot again.
I know this isn’t a solution… but hopefully it helps you a bit.
This doesn’t seem to help, sadly. hwinfo doesn’t cause much trouble, and I can confirm that it happens on window context switching using that same program when Task Manager just won’t see it. There’s a ton of anomalous power drain from these kinds of things.
Thanks for the info, though. I appreciate it a lot.
