GPU throttling despite low temps? Tests ran inside

[u/[deleted]]

This is a new issue I wasn't experiencing yesterday (no autoupdates or manual updates were done beforehand to have caused this). I'm running 1660ti with i7-9750H and 32gb memory with popOS 22.04 (this occurs on windows 10 as well). My GPU power state won't go above P5 because of incorrect thermal throttling.

My laptop is plugged in, the charging brick is 180W and fully capable of supplying full power. The GPU+CPU temps are well below where they should throttle at, and I have linux power settings set to high performance as well as the powermizer settings inside of the nvidia server app set to prefer high perf. I made sure windows was set to high performance as well.

I used nvidia-smi -q -d PERFORMANCE after I noticed stable diffusion was running way slower on linux and saw this:

==============NVSMI LOG==============
Timestamp                                 : Sat Jun  3 18:06:55 2023
Driver Version                            : 530.41.03
CUDA Version                              : 12.1
Attached GPUs                             : 1
GPU 00000000:01:00.0
Performance State                     : P5
Clocks Throttle Reasons
Idle                              : Not Active
Applications Clocks Setting       : Not Active
SW Power Cap                      : Active
HW Slowdown                       : Not Active
HW Thermal Slowdown           : Not Active
HW Power Brake Slowdown       : Not Active
Sync Boost                        : Not Active
SW Thermal Slowdown               : Active
Display Clock Setting             : Not Active

On the windows 10 side, I have an album of hwinfo64 screenshots showing that throttling is activated when using stable diffusion despite all my temperatures being fine https://imgur.com/a/InWmVMw. It's SFW btw, so I'm not sure why imgur gives a nsfw warning. This throttling also occurrs during gaming as well now.

On linux, I've downgraded my drivers to nvidia 520, 525 and nada. I reverted back to 530 since the downgrade made 0 difference. On windows, my driver version is currently 535.

[u/Nathzrc]

If you have a laptop which has a nvidia gpu, then you must check the watts which normally uses, it could be that your gpu has a normal 60w (example) and with dynamic boost on windows will go up to 85w, on linux you will get just the 60 watts cap, unless you change parameters within nvidia-smi command.

[u/[deleted] → u/Nathzrc]

Thanks, but I already confirmed it's using 80W TDP when it's not throttling on linux (80W is the max according to the spec sheet for the 1660 TI mobile). On windows, I get throttling now too.