why is my gpu usage so high with no games and apps open

23 Comments

  1. BaconHammer9000

    malware. wipe your drive and reinstall

  2. Aggravating_Gate5338

    Maybe you turned on desktop recording for instant replay; check it in AMD Adrenaline.

  3. Izan_TM

    shhhh don’t wake it up, it’s dreaming

  4. TwoCylToilet

    Go to processes and enable the GPU usage column. Sort by GPU usage and see which process(es) are using it.

  5. Supernova849

    There are quite a few apps that use the gpu for hardware acceleration. Windows desktop, discord, chrome, the list is extensive but I would pin it to one of those three first. Task manger isn’t well known for its accurate usage metrics either.

  6. Twin-Duct

    It could be a number of things. I actually was having this issue earlier today. My mind goes to malware first. Install malwarebytes and run a scan. It comes with a free trial of the full membership so the scan will be better than the free version. Run the scan, and if it detects anything, it will get rid of it. If you wanna be extra cautious, you could reinstall windows.

    If no virus(es) detected, I’d check to make sure your drivers are up to date. If they are, then reinstall your drivers. I see you have a radeon card, so you’d have to look up how to reinstall the drivers because I’m not well versed with radeon gpus.

    Also, if you use an overlay/HUD like radeon overlay, msi afterburner, or discord’s overlay, turn it off because they can use up resources.

    Hope this helps

  7. redditisantitruth

    That is a wonderful question to ask task manager

  8. Requesting tech support from r/pcmasterrace is asking for trouble

  9. Razex15

    Maybe check out the power usage in the amd software. It usually gives a much better representation of how much a gpu is actually working

  10. Saitzev

    Either download process explorer or bring up Resource Monitor and see what tasks are running. They’ll give you exponentially more data than task manager.

  11. shedosexy

    Y’all are saying it should be Instant Replay, but it shouldn’t, there’s no way Instant Replay is pushing 54% of a gpu.
    I think it’s a crypto miner or some malware.

  12. Kougeru-Sama

    Weird how literally no one is asking if you’re watching a fucking a video. If you have hardware acceleration on (which you should in 2025), videos all use the GPU video decoder. Task manager is kinda useless for watching GPU usage because it will show activity like this when only the encoder or decoder is in use. So if you’re watching a 4k or 8k video on AV1 it could easily show up as 50-100% GPU usage while having no noticeable effect on your PC’s performance (the entire point of GPU decoders). So, were you watching videos at the time? There should also be setting there to enable viewing the encoder and decoder usage to confirm this but it’s off by default. Click the three dot menu

  13. It’s ReLive/desktop recording and the use isn’t actually high.

    The GPU is clocked down and so even a very low load “looks” high.

  14. Necro-User-29

    It’s based off the clock speed when the card is idle is down clocks so the little bit of shit it’s doing actually takes up most of the available resources at that slow speed.

  15. Haliphaxx

    I was just about to make a post about this. I just got a 9070xt and it’s running at about 55% usage just sitting at the desktop. I do have instant replay on so maybe I will try turning that off.

  16. Ferchitoqn

    Someone is using pirate software hahaha

  17. lLoveTech

    I think it’s a bug because I have that too when the adrenaline software says that the GPU utilisation is zero

  18. iAmGats

    Hi! Yeah, sorry it’s me. I’m mining crypto with your PC rn.

  19. Different_Variation6

    someones mining bitcoin on ur shit bro

  20. Effective_Top_3515

    Browser have hardware acceleration on?

Write A Comment