GPU usage rising when idle? Is this normal?

So today I was monitoring my GPU while it was idle just to check the temp of the card at that moment, only to find something unusual.

My GPU was rapidly spiking to 89% usage and then back to 0%, staying at 89% for no more than a second before going back down. I searched google for information on this, only to find people claiming this to be the result of a virus originating in Adobe via an svhost. I used malwarebytes to scan my computer for viruses, but it found nothing.

It has since stopped spiking to 89%, but now still spikes to 15% rapidly, sometimes the "spike" lasts for long periods of time versus only a split second, seemingly only when I run firefox.

I've never really monitored my GPU usage while running Firefox before, so I'm not sure if the 15% is normal or part of the weirdness I was encountering earlier. However, the spikes to 89% earlier were happening when absolutely nothing was open, not even firefox.

So is this normal, or should I be concerned?

EDIT: Scratch that, it's still randomly spiking to 15% at moments when Firefox isn't even open...

EDIT 2 (2/28/2014): It's at it again. Now it seems to like 68%. Again, while absolutely nothing else is running. Here's a screenshot for you:



As you can see, these spikes are fast, and rapid. It seems to only happen after going to this site: heromachine.com

I was using it for a few quick concept arts, closed the page and firefox, and then bam, GPU spikes, still going for about 30 minutes now.

I wouldnt worry about it too much. If it keeps spiking at 100%; then yea i would say there is a issue; but since its only doing 15%; then I dont think there should be a issue at this point.

Good to know.

The spiking seems to have calmed down significantly, so I'm hoping I don't have anymore problems.

15% is normal, 80+% is not, what are the temps of the gpu?

As mentioned, ~%15 is normal as it's simply the hardware Acceleration of Firefox. As also mentioned as long as it's not spiking high and staying that way there's nothing to be alarmed about.

I have better luck not using any Hardware Acceleration with any browser.

There have been quite a few nvidia drivers that have broken h/w accel in browsers. Saw plenty of complaints on the geforce forums about it. Especially 770 users.

It's at it again, check my original post for details.

Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but don't AMD drivers allow the CPU to offload work to the video card? I just checked my card and it's spiking between 10 and 15%. Other than being here on the forums, I'm not doing anything, so I assume it's my computer indexing in the background and using the GPU as an extra bit of processing power. There's also slight activity on four of my cores.

In my case, it might be background tasks. It might be that way for the OP as well, but 60+% seems pretty high...

Mellon Head said:

Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but don't AMD drivers allow the CPU to offload work to the video card? I just checked my card and it's spiking between 10 and 15%. Other than being here on the forums, I'm not doing anything, so I assume it's my computer indexing in the background and using the GPU as an extra bit of processing power. There's also slight activity on four of my cores.

In my case, it might be background tasks. It might be that way for the OP as well, but 60+% seems pretty high...

Click to expand...

As I said, it only seems to get like that after I go to that one website.

I've also noticed some games that didn't use to lag at all having framerate stutters since this.

You could have picked up some drive by malware from that site...

Mellon Head said:

You could have picked up some drive by malware from that site...

Click to expand...

Figured as much, but when it first started happening, I ran Malwarebytes, it detected nothing. Also used McAfee Site Adviser to scan the site, and that said there was nothing suspicious on it (not sure how reliable that is, though).

Also, my GPU isn't at high rates 24/7, right now it's running at a happy 0% usage, but after going to that site it goes to 60% - 80% for about an hour after completely leaving the site and closing firefox (as well as all other applications).

Not sure what to think of it. But even with my GPU usage being normal, the framerate stuttering is still occurring, and I didn't have that prior to this. Not sure if that's related, or just coincidental.