Background story: I recently bought a computer with AMD 7000 series CPU and GPU.
amdgpu_top reports 15 ~ 20 watts in normal desktop usage, but as soon as I have video playing in VLC, it goes to 45 watts constantly which is undesirable behavior especially in summer. (I hope that is just reporting issue... but my computer is hot)
When I do DRI_PRIME=1 vlc and then play videos, amdgpu_top doesn't report the power surge. (I have iGPU enabled)
Is there anything more convenient then modifying individual .desktop files? KDE malfunctions when I put export DRI_PRIME=1 in .xprofile so that's a no go.
Solved: removing mesa related hardware acceleration package makes VLC fall back to libplacebo which doesn't do these weird things.
Which distro are you using. Fedora, manjaro and few others disabled hardware acceleration for certain codecs making CPU and power spike. For Fedora you can enable RPM fusion and install the hardware acceleration versions and be back to normal .
https://rpmfusion.org/
Turns out in my case it's mesa driver causing my problem, after removing mesa's VA-API and VDPAU drivers VLC can still play things just fine, CPU is at 2~3%.