Enormous battery drain after Hardware Encoding render - but no problems with Software Encoding!

[JanKowalski95]

I'm having very specific issue with Adobe Premiere Pro. After rendering a video with regular Hardware Encoding settings, my laptops battery drains incredibly fast (faster than 1% per minute!!), even when Adobe Premiere or any other CC Service is closed.

Restarting PC doesn't solve the issue. Re-installing/updating BIOS is the only thing that brings computer back to normal.

I found temporary solution to this issue by switching to Software Encoding, which doesn't cause any issues after rendering a video - battery behaves normally.

I have already investigated this issue and yes, Premiere Pro is what seems to be causing the issue. I performed reinstall of BIOS, PP, rendered random video, and the same battery problem appeared again. Then I reinstalled BIOS, PP, rendered random video on Software Encoding and everything was working correctly.

Hardware Encoding is obviously much faster. How can I make it work correctly again? It's also worth mentioning that this problem appeared out of the blue, I have never faced any other issues. Hardware Encoding was working properly and wasn't causing any issues too.

My PC specs:

Dell Vostro 7590

CPU: Intel Core i7-9750H

GPU: Intel UHD Graphics 630

          NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 (used for rendering)

RAM: 16GB

OS: Windows 10 Pro

[RjL190365]

Here's why:

Higher-end discrete GPUs, even laptop ones, consume far more power than even the most powerful of laptop (as opposed to desktop) CPUs to begin with.

And battery size is a serious compromise between portability/transportability and performance, to the point that higher-performance laptops either have far shorter battery life or are far larger and heavier than lesser-performance laptops.

There is simply no circumventing this fact. As a result, laptops should be plugged into an AC mains outlet for the best performance in video editing. Or better yet, ditch the laptop in favo(u)r of a full-blown desktop PC.

[JanKowalski95]

I think you misunderstood the point of the problem. I'm not surprised with quick battery usage in the editing process or during encoding, when Premiere Pro is running. It's obvious it uses a lot of energy and will drain the battery quickly - that's why I'm always using Premiere Pro with AC plugged in, as you recommend. 

The problem is, huge battery drain keeps up after closing the Premiere Pro and literally everything else. The battery drains faster than 1% per minute even when laptop has been running on 'idle' for hours already. When I noticed this issue I turned laptop off, left it overnight, and the next day after turning it on battery was still draining that fast, even though laptop was dead cold and there was no process running that could use that huge amount of energy.

The laptop itself doesn't have any battery issues. It can keep up for hours. You can find other info in original post, I hope it's clear for you now. 

[Warren Heaton]

It sounds like your Graphics Settings are getting stuck in High Performace mode rather than dynamically switching back to the Intel UHD Graphics 630 after NVIDIA GeForce GTX has been in use by Premiere Pro which, of course, is strange.

Have you noticed if the same thing happens when using Adobe Media Encoder, After Effects, or Photoshop?

It might be worth starting a support chat with both Dell and Adobe to see why this might be happening.  Hopefully it's just something in the NVIDIA Control Panel that needs to be set differently.

On the macOS side there's a great utility called gfxCardStatus (https://gfx.io) that allows users to quickly switch between Integrated Only, Dedicated Only, or Dynamic Switching.  It's specifically meant for seeing which apps are affecting battery life by using more power-hungry graphics.  I don't know of a Windows equivalent, though.

[JanKowalski95]

Thank you for your reply.

I have started a support chat with both NVIDIA and Dell, both couldn't help me - Dell Support only helped me with fixing the issue with mentioned BIOS reinstall. Here is what they wrote:

We cannot provide a definite solution to the third-party application. I can assure you that the issue is with the application and not with the laptop.

Even if computer is stuck in High Performance mode, the battery drain was still enormus. The battery was still draining even though computer was running on 'idle', without any apps open, and according to Task Manager, Dedicated GPU was barely running! Both GPUs and CPU usage were not higher than 10%! There was literally nothing in particular I could find that could use that much energy.

Check out my reply to another Community User in this thread, I provide some more detail there, maybe it will be somehow helpful.

I just have no idea what happens, this issue is really weird.

[Warren Heaton]

Did Dell support have you run Windows PowerShell to get a battery report?

Of course, if there was an issue with the battery itself, you'd very likely see that with or without Premiere Pro.

This is one of the more frustrating tech issues to experience: Dell can't necessarily help.  NVIDIA can't necessarily help.  Adobe can't necessarily help.

If you haven't done this already, I'd go the trouble of doing a system restore on the laptop and install just Premiere Pro before any other software.  Then see if you can reproduce the issue.  While it might not seem like an unrelated program could affect anything, eons ago I had a fax driver cause all footage in After Effects to load as 0 pixels by 0 pixels.  Once disabled, AE was back to normal.

[JanKowalski95]

I have completed battery diagnostics through BIOS and no issues were found, battery is said to be in excellent condition.

Well, I think that's what I will do if I don't find any better solution soon. I'm not into computers enough to know if some unrelated program can affect another, especially since I don't recall installing anything new at the time. Task Manager didn't show literally any process in the background that would use loads of power in particular, if it did I would just delete/quit this process...

Anyway thank you for your help, please let me know if you ever find some solution!