I have two Sapphire Nitro R9 Fury graphics cards with fans that normally turn off during low load, such as when browsing the web. However, with Epiphany, I noticed fans would start spinning every now and then, so I looked at GPU load, temps and power consumption on my primary card. Take a look at vddgfx, temp1 and power1 compared to when I'm using Firefox: Firefox 61 (with OpenGL compositing forced on, it's off by default) amdgpu-pci-0900 Adapter: PCI adapter vddgfx: +0.93 V fan1: 774 RPM temp1: +67.0°C (crit = +89.0°C, hyst = -273.1°C) power1: 19.00 W (cap = 260.00 W) Epiphany 3.28.2 amdgpu-pci-0900 Adapter: PCI adapter vddgfx: +1.25 V fan1: 751 RPM temp1: +76.0°C (crit = +89.0°C, hyst = -273.1°C) power1: 59.00 W (cap = 260.00 W) While offloading work to a GPU can be a good thing, this does seem excessive to me. I can imagine this would hurt battery life quite a bit if this was a mobile device. In this specific test case I had one tab open with a YouTube-video playing, but pretty much any website shows similar result. I am running a Wayland session on Debian Sid with GNOME 3.28.2 screenfetch -n kristoffer@kristoffer-debian-desktop OS: Debian unstable sid Kernel: x86_64 Linux 4.17.0-1-amd64 Uptime: 3h 2m Packages: 1980 Shell: bash 4.4.23 Resolution: 2560x1440 DE: GNOME WM: GNOME Shell WM Theme: GTK Theme: Adwaita [GTK2/3] Icon Theme: Adwaita Font: Cantarell 11 CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 1700X Eight-Core @ 16x 3.4GHz [46.6°C] GPU: AMD Radeon (TM) R9 Fury Series (FIJI, DRM 3.25.0, 4.17.0-1-amd64, LLVM 6.0.1) RAM: 3246MiB / 32167MiB Original bug report: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/epiphany/issues/74
Carlos Garcia and I have both noticed excessive CPU usage under Wayland sessions, but we don't know what's causing it. You're the first to report an issue with GPU usage, though. It doesn't help that amdgpu graphics are new and not quite popular yet. :( (In reply to Kristoffer from comment #0) > In this specific test case I had one tab open with a YouTube-video playing, > but pretty much any website shows similar result. It actually shouldn't... YouTube triggers GPU use because it requires either 3D transforms or animations. Other websites should not use the GPU at all. You can verify by playing with the environment variable WEBKIT_DISABLE_COMPOSITING_MODE=1 (should disable GPU use regardless of website) or WEBKIT_FORCE_COMPOSITING_MODE=1 (should force it regardless of website).
I may have inadvertently compared to other media heavy sites. This bugtracker and phoronix.com only shows 15-20W. WEBKIT_DISABLE_COMPOSITING_MODE=1 did indeed drop GPU power to 20-ish Watts, even on YouTube.