I've discovered a strange behavior with dwm.exe process and I hoped someone here can clarify things for me.
Little background - this issue came to my attention while I was trying to push my system to produce stable 4k@60 in Witcher 3 on ultra/high settings. The specs are ryzen 3800x (yes, I got marketed into buying one of these), 32GB RAM 3600, RTX 2080super. The result is not bad - I get 50ish frames at ultra settings and if I drop some to high it's more like 55-60, but still not ideal.
So I've noticed that while system isn't running any games, GPU usage shown in Task Manager and MSI Afterburner can go as high as 10-15%, divided between Desktop Windows Manager and Client Server Runtime Process. I've googled what these processes are and basically came to conclusion that the issue with them is unavoidable due to how Windows works these days.
However, my main question is about what happen to dwm.exe GPU usage while the game is running. I've launched Witcher 3 to look at the behavior of this process and found out that it seems like all GPU load from the game was processed via dwm.exe, while the witcher.exe process sits at 0.1% GPU load. In the same time MSI Afterburner shows 99% GPU usage. Is this normal? If not, what can I do about it? Thanks in advance to anyone who takes time to post in this thread.
P.S. For testing purposes I've ran witcher on my monitor in 1080p, not TV.
Andrey Tkach got a reaction from Mark Kaine in Desktop Windows Manager high GPU usage
