Desktop Window Manager 45% GPU Usage

Hi, I have been having an issue with Desktop Window Manager sitting at around 45% GPU usage while I am on PoE2. I have tried 4-5 other games and I tried to pick the most graphics demanding games I could and the dwm.exe sits at 2% on all of them. I tried a ton of fixes off google and none of them worked, I turned off my windows hardware acceleration, changed power settings, updated graphics driver, ran windows diagnostics, changed dwm.exe priority, turning off windows visual fx and nothing works. It seems like the more I do on my other monitors the higher the dwm.exe GPU usage goes. I tested watching a discord stream and watching a YouTube video while on poe2 and dwm.exe went up to 40%, when I get on other games and repeat this same process dwm.exe still only sits at 2%.

Task Manager Screenshot: https://i.imgur.com/WultfJF.png (I was just sitting in my hideout)

PC Specs:

Processor AMD Ryzen 7 5700X3D 8-Core Processor 3.00 GHz
Installed RAM 32.0 GB
Storage 9.10 TB HDD WDC WD100EFAX-68LHPN0, 1.82 TB SSD Samsung SSD 970 EVO Plus 2TB, 466 GB SSD Samsung SSD 850 EVO 500GB, 1.82 TB HDD ST2000DX001-1CM164
Graphics Card NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Ti (12 GB)
System Type 64-bit operating system, x64-based processor
Operating System: Windows 10 Version 22H2 fully up to date

UPDATE: After some more messing around I closed Medaltv and that helped a lot. I run medal on every game though and never had this issue so it seems to be some kind of interaction with PoE2 and Medaltv. With Medal closed it brings my dwm.exe down to 17% usage from 45%. Which 17% is still higher than any other game I get on.

UPDATE 2: So after learning that I could intentionally raise the usage of dwm.exe by having more things going on my other monitors I hopped back on some other games and it did spike on those too, not nearly as high though. I decided to update to Win 11 to see if that helps, after updating I decided to try the setting on PoE "Foreground FPS Cap" which for some reason I was stupid and didn't try the first time I went through settings. The second I capped my fps to 144 dwm.exe went from between 50-60% GPU usage down to 15-30%. I then repeatedly unchecked it and rechecked it over and over and everytime I did dwm.exe would raise and lower. So all in all it isn't purely a PoE2 problem but I think due to PoE2 being so demanding on my PC it's somehow also causing dwm.exe to be more demanding which then causes problems more than any other game. I should also note that I have since completely wiped my windows to see if that would help and everything I mentioned above is still the same.
Last edited by Mithology#1274 on Apr 14, 2025, 2:52:29 PM
Last bumped on Apr 13, 2025, 4:33:04 PM

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