Please see the post below for the cause and suggested fix.
Voicemeeter Potato v3.0.2.2 (Should also affect Banana too)
OS: Windows 10 (21H1)
May Affect:
Gamers, users of GPU-accelerated software, streamers.
Situation:
Running Voicemeeter Banana or Potato will cause an increase of 10-40% load on the graphics card, as well as consume ~600MB of vRAM (for Potato).
In my case, an nVidia RTX 3070 Ti was pushing 10-40% "idle" loads with Voicemeeter Potato running and 0% when it's off.
To replicate:
On a system running Voicemeeter Potato:
- Run "GPU-Z", switch to the "Sensors" tab and keep an eye on the "GPU Load" and "Memory Used" data rows.
- Close/terminate Voicemeeter Potato.
- Watch the GPU Load drop to ~0% (or at least drop by ~10-30%)
- Wait approximately 1-minute for Voicemeeter to unload from memory.
- Watch the "Memory Used" data row drop by approximately 600MBs of vRAM usage.
Voicemeeter should not be straining our video cards to run the GUI/interface, and should not be using 600MBs of vRAM. This behavior is rather unusual.
The above problem will impact gamers and streamers quite a bit, especially users with lower-end graphics cards or cards with less vRAM available.
Unfortunately most users won't notice this problem since we don't usually expect a non-3D/gaming program to be so GPU resource intensive.
Hiding Voicemeeter's interface will not reduce "GPU Load" nor "Memory Used".
Thanks in advance!