Hello,
I am using CachyOS and experiencing a severe power management/usage issue with my NVIDIA RTX 3050 Laptop GPU under Wayland.
System Details:
Laptop Model: Acer Nitro 5 (AN515-57)
CPU: Intel Core i5-11400H
RAM: 16 GB
GPU: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 Laptop GPU
OS: CachyOS (KDE Plasma 6, Wayland) - Dual-booting with Windows
NVIDIA Driver: 595.71.05
The Problem:
Usage Spikes: When the system is completely idle, GPU usage sits around 1%–2% and draws about 6W. However, randomly, as soon as I open a simple application (this happens almost every time I open the terminal, or sometimes when opening Zen Browser), the GPU usage immediately spikes to 50%–100%, and the power consumption jumps from 6W to 17W–18W.
Process Mismatch: Interestingly, nvidia-smi shows no active processes under the process list, but btop and KDE System Monitor report 90%–100% GPU utilization.
Stuck in Performance Level 3: In the NVIDIA Settings panel, I can see that the GPU gets completely locked at "Performance Level 3" (highest performance state) during these spikes. This keeps the laptop idling at around 50°C with high power consumption.
What Led to This (Potential Trigger):
I suspect this issue started after I installed gaming-related packages from the “Hello CachyOS” app. Right after installing those packages, some system/app icons and logos suddenly disappeared, which makes me think some graphics libraries, drivers, or system configs might have broken or conflicted.
What I’ve Tried So Far:
Configured and verified locale settings (en_US.UTF-8).
Set up NVIDIA VRAM Management systemd services, but it didn't resolve the issue.
I highly suspect that kwin_wayland or the compositor rendering loop is causing a conflict with the NVIDIA driver after those gaming packages were installed, preventing the GPU from downclocking.
How can I fix this conflict or force the NVIDIA card to drop into a lower power state/idle clock when there is no heavy graphical load? Any help or workarounds would be greatly appreciated.
Thank you!
