Desktop Window Manager uses almost equivalent or more GPU as much as a Unity build does on Windows. How to reduce GPU usage by DWM? [It is possible]

When I minimize or close the Unity build, the DWM goes back to 0.1%, else it takes the same amount of GPU as the Unity Build does around 20%.

Sometimes DWM reaches 50+% usage even when unity build is working in background, Unity taking 15% GPU. But the moment I close Unity build the DWM comes back to 0.1% GPU usage.


An example would be this program[Unity Built] I use, which doesn’t make DWM to use GPU more than 7-8%. :

Music Visualizer Engine PC Live Wallpaper[Available on Steam].


The attached image is of an empty scene running on my Laptop.


What’s your actual question here? The DWM is the central composite manager that combines all the content of all the visible windows together on the GPU. Therefore Windows is most likely not able to distinguish the actual GPU load between the applications.

I still don’t quite see an actual question here that is Unity related. Your title as well as your description both represent a statement and not a question.

I am having the same issue. My game running on a 480x480 window. My game has only 1 DAZ3D avatar with most of the 3D ray tracing overwrites on. Whenever I run the little game, the GPU usage was almost entirely dedicated to the desktop window manager. I believe this is a windows bug because the issue only happens when I have 2 games running at the same time. One is the game I developed(only 480x480 resolution) and the other game is overwatch. When running my own game only, my game uses less than 1% gpu and the damn desktop window manager takes almost 30%. This is insane waste of resources. On another hand however, when running overwatch, desktop window manger takes only about 1% and overwatch uses about 30%. Therefore maybe overwatch is optimized for the current windows and my game is not. Could you shed some light on how to improve the game I’m developing?