[voochi]

When not running XBMC (in Win7), my idle GPU temperatures are about 35C with no discernible fan noise (i have a quiet case). Actually I lie because this is not idle, I can surf the web, move windows around the screen, scroll through documents etc with no major change in GPU temperature.

As soon as I start up XBMC, the temps raise about 15C in the space of 3-4 minutes. And the GPU fan becomes very noticeably louder.

And that is sitting on a 100% static home screen, with no animations (rss ticker disabled, no widgets, no animated background etc) and no user input. XBMC is using massive amounts of GPU power to do nothing basically. In this era of green awareness etc it seems unacceptable.

Dirty regions was touted to improve this but my understanding is that it only lowers CPU useage when things are moving. The problem I am talking about is GPU useage when nothing is changing on screen.

My GPU is Nvidia GTX460. It is crazy how displaying a static screen can be so taxing for a mid-range gaming GPU.

I have prefixed this thread with Windows but I have XBMCbuntu and OpenElec running on a couple of other systems and the behaviour is the same. High GPU useage in the menus even when nothing is moving. And it's not related to Eden or any specific version of XBMC because it has been like this for as long as I can remember, across multiple systems.

Would I be correct in saying that this is due to XBMC running in a gameloop?

[ihaterich]

I have the same problem on one of my machines, running a Nvidia 9500gt. When playing video the temps are normal, but remaining on the home screen for more than a couple minutes causes the temps to rise until the computer freezes (seen it over 105c after 10 minutes or so).

[mal2]

Dirty regions was touted to improve this but my understanding is that it only lowers CPU useage when things are moving. The problem I am talking about is GPU useage when nothing is changing on screen.

That's exactly backwards. The way dirty regions saves on processing power is by only rendering the section of the screen where things have moved. If the entire screen is static, then no rendering needs to be done at all. If only a small portion of the screen is animated, then only that small portion needs to be rendered.

[armitatz]

I have the same problem with a nvidia 9600m. The gpu is always over 55C . I updated the nvidia drivers to 295.40 but the problem persists. I have the same behaviour with openelec beta (eden) and with xbmcubuntu. I did not had this problem with dharma. The cpu is always at 10% and at 35C and the gpu is very hot always.