Bug 508566

Summary:	KDE System monitor reports way higher gpu usage than is actually correct
Product:	[Applications] plasma-systemmonitor	Reporter:	gamingengineer377
Component:	general	Assignee:	KSysGuard Developers <ksysguard-bugs>
Status:	RESOLVED DUPLICATE
Severity:	normal	CC:	ahiemstra, jb, kdedev, plasma-bugs-null
Priority:	NOR
Version First Reported In:	6.4.4
Target Milestone:	---
Platform:	CachyOS
OS:	Linux
Latest Commit:		Version Fixed In:
Sentry Crash Report:
Attachments:	Video footage of the bug

Description gamingengineer377 2025-08-21 17:11:46 UTC

SUMMARY
The KDE system monitor inflates the gpu usage by about 40%. This also extends to the widgets that are created from the system monitor. This results in situations where the gpu is actually being used at 100%, and system monitor reports ~140%, which is nonsensical. It used to work fine before, however i cannot pinpoint when exactly it started misbehaving. I have confirmed with nvidia-smi and nvidia-settings that the usage is actually being misreported, as they indicate it correctly.

STEPS TO REPRODUCE
1. Open the system monitor program
2. Look at the GPU sensor chart
3. It reports higher than actual usage

OBSERVED RESULT
Wrongly inflated usage percentage

EXPECTED RESULT
Correct usage percentage

SOFTWARE/OS VERSIONS

Operating System: CachyOS Linux                                                           
KDE Plasma Version: 6.4.4                                                                 
KDE Frameworks Version: 6.17.0                                                         
Qt Version: 6.9.1                                                                      
Kernel Version: 6.16.1-2-cachyos (64-bit)                                              
Graphics Platform: Wayland
Processors: 20 × 13th Gen Intel® Core™ i5-13600KF
Memory: 24 GiB of RAM (23.3 GiB usable)
Graphics Processor: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060

Comment 1 TraceyC 2025-08-21 22:47:49 UTC

I'm not able to reproduce this on a system with an AMD GPU running git-master
Unfortunately, System Monitor shows me nothing on my system with an NVIDIA GPU. Hopefully someone else can try to reproduce with NVIDIA.

Comment 2 Jean-Baptiste Mardelle 2025-08-22 07:41:54 UTC

I cannot reproduce the issue on my system. 

AMD Ryzen CPU
NVidia RTX-4070 GPU

System Monitor: 6.3.6
Manjaro Linux (Wayland)
KDE Frameworks: 6.17.0
Qt: Using 6.9.1 and built against 6.9.1
Build ABI: x86_64-little_endian-lp64
Kernel: linux 6.12.41-1-MANJARO

Comment 3 gamingengineer377 2025-08-22 09:37:22 UTC

Created attachment 184334 [details]
Video footage of the bug

Comment 4 TraceyC 2025-08-22 19:40:39 UTC

Thanks for the screen recording, that's useful. 

Some key data from it:
With the War Thunder game running through Steam:
btop shows 97% GPU usage.
GPU in System Monitor - Overview shows ~135-140%. Same is shown in widget on the desktop. 

After minimizing the game:
btop shows 91% GPU usage
System monitor shows 54%

Game re-maximized
System monitor - 136%
btop - 99%

Game minimized
btop - GPU usage drops to 16% GPU.
System monitor shows 53%

I'll leave this open so others can try to reproduce

Comment 5 TraceyC 2025-09-29 19:20:37 UTC

This looks like a duplicate of bug 488440, please follow that report for updates

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 488440 ***