Question Heads up Chrome users

[punkncat]

At some point within the recent updates Chrome has chosen to restore the "continue running background apps when Google Chrome is closed" selector back to on.
If you have the "Use hardware acceleration when possible" slider also on you may have noticed some unusual GPU activity within the last little bit.

Just a quick FYI on why you may have been seeing unusual usage numbers the last few days.

:cheers:

 

[punkncat]

This brings me to a bit of a side discussion here.

I thought I had a virus, was checking some various things, got all that cleared away. Kept thinking that I had some manner of super sneaky crypto malware thing going. After doing some work trying to find another issue, part of the result was that my programmed (Afterburner) fan curve for the GPU got wiped. As Nvidia cards do, the stock fan curve on this card doesn't even start till it's ~70*C. I was looking for causation to the other issue and kept coming back to a couple of weird indicators.

My GPU utilization was only 3-5%, BUT as noted in Afterburner (later) it was running at ~1500 MHz. My normal idle usage is 0 and something like 1xxMHz. I also noted that I was having ethernet usage at 0, but spiking to full/zero back and forth.
I enabled GPU logging/engine within Task Manager and noted that Google Chrome was the culprit and was performing some manner of 3D render.

If I were to take a guess here, I would bet that while Google isn't actively being used that they have set such that with "run in background" and "hardware acceleration" enabled that they are leveraging every computer on the web using Chrome for a small amount of power to do work for them. Pretty crafty...my uninformed .02

 

[punkncat]

Edge does this as well. It must be any Chrom(ium) based browser. It didn't get quite as bold as Chrome, but does.