Firefox and Opera both wake my 2nd GPU

[Ramses]

And my average power usage goes from 198 to 340 watts as indicated by my UPS because of it. I've dissabled every type of hardware acceleration and smooth scrolling and such in both and it makes no difference, and it's not a given page that's open. Chrome and IE don't do this.
WTF is the deal.

 

[mikeymikec]

Especially odd since AFAIK Opera uses Google's rendering engine these days.

 

[Ramses]

I thought so too but it absolutely behaves just like firefox as far as the 2nd gpu temp/usage goes. IE and Chrome do not.

 

[Berryracer]

When I go to about:support page in Firefox, it always shows 2nd GPU: Inactive and I actually asked on the Mozilline Forums how to make it active. Strange that you're saying its active when it shouldn't

I suggest you post this thread here: http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewforum.php?f=38&sid=70e60a047649428aacb2cdbba4c87ee8

 

[Ramses]

Will do. Mine says GPU2 active: false too but direct monitoring of the GPU and power usage says otherwise.

 

[Berryracer]

how can I check this myself? I don't have a UPS, it's an Alienware 18 laptop

What ticks me off is, you would think that enable hardware acceleration if available would be smoother right? for me, and every single post I read online of someone complaining about glitchy performance or jerky scroll movement, they suggest to turn hardware acceleration off!

After 33 versions of firefox, I would've thought that Mozilla ought to know how to use a simple tool such as a GPU to make the browsing experience smoother.

To be honest, as much as I hate it, I find that IE does this the best, scrolling is buttery smooth, but then I hate everything else, like the fact that my logins on sites get cleared randomly and I have to relogin even though I didn't clear out the cookies, and the add-ons suck 🙁

 

[Ramses]

Any monitoring utility that shows GPU usage/fan speed/temp for each GPU should do it.
Hell you can hear the fan run up in mine, that's what made me go look lol.