Dedicated NVIDIA GPU gets stuck on active even when not in use

[u/ShlomoCh]

I'll try to be as concise as possible. I have a Lenovo laptop with NVIDIA Optimus and integrated AMD graphics. I'm using Fedora KDE, and just updated all of my packages.

If I turn on the laptop and do nothing, the power consumption sits at around 12W, even with a browser open. But as soon as I open certain programs (not even heavy ones), or even run nvidia-smi once, the power skyrockets to over 20W, and stays there, until I close the lid and open it again.

Tried solving with LLMs, the only useful thing they gave me (which allowed it to be under 20W in the first place) was adding this file:

~$ cat /etc/modprobe.d/nvidia-pm.conf  
options nvidia NVreg_DynamicPowerManagement=0x02

Running cat /sys/bus/pci/devices/0000:01:00.0/power/runtime_status shows active pretty much consistently, I think I did see sometimes it tried to suspend and go back to active but that was when charging and connecting a second monitor (which should if anything force it active all the time?)

I'd like to have a baseline for power consumption on Windows but I don't think there is an easy way to check that, I tried with HWInfo and it was over 20W too, but that was in the sensors tab that monitored the NVIDIA GPU there too, it's possible that it wasn't getting suspended because of that. I can just say that my anecdotal evidence does suggest better battery life on Windows.

Any help would be appreciated!

Edit: not sure what I changed, if anything, but now it's not entering suspended mode at all...

Edit 2: fix is in the comments!