Incorrect. Rhino has nothing to do with any of this. There isn’t a single line of code in Rhino that’s causing this to happen…and you’ve proved it by changing a setting in an application that is external to Rhino that causes the issue to go away. Since that’s the case, which part of Rhino is causing this? Answer: None.
You’re just not understanding what’s going on here.
NVidia drivers (All OEM drivers) have what are called “Application/Program Profiles”, where you can configure specific settings for a specific application that will “override” the global/base settings. If/when an application profile does not exist for a given .EXE file, the drivers will use the global/base settings for that app… That’s it… that’s all there is to it. There’s no magic, there’s no special line(s) of code that’s causing this.
With that said:
NVidia has a list of bundled profiles that ship with their drivers, and apparently Rhino is one of those. The drivers aren’t autodetecting .exe files on your system and creating the profiles, they’re preconfigured settings that ship with the drivers. So when you’re comparing Rhino to other applications, are you also looking to see if those applications have a profile defined? And if they do, are the settings the same as the Rhino profile? Pretty sure they won’t be… and if the application you’re comparing doesn’t have a profile, then it means the drivers will be using the global/base settings. So you’re comparing apples to oranges and making incorrect conclusions and assumptions.
I’m guessing that at some point in the past McNeel made a specific request from NVidia (most likely for a specific driver version) to set the “Power management mode” to “Maximum” in order to bypass Intel’s terrible power-switching technology that prevented discrete GPUs from being used by Rhino, and NVidia has continued to provide that profile within their driver releases ever since…
How the drivers interpret what that setting means, is 100% out of McNeel’s control. Also, keep in mind that this does not happen on every system. It probably doesn’t happen at all on most Desktops, and only seems to be happening on specific laptops (and/or drivers). I have a laptop here with an RTX 5000 in it, and it does not exhibit this behavior. Which implies that NVidia’s drivers interpret the “Power manage mode” setting differently based on the system/configuration. Again, completely out of McNeel’s control.
The only thing McNeel can do moving forward is to make a request to NVidia to have them change the profile (or remove it altogether) so that this doesn’t happen on certain configurations. There is nothing McNeel can do from a coding perspective to affect this type of change…unfortunately.
I will continue looking into this and hopefully get some answers (and fix) from NVidia in the coming week(s).
Thanks,
-Jeff