Despite Asobo’s ‘best’ efforts to address this, it’s still an issue.
Due to FS failing to start after the last update I was forced to reinstall all the content. I actually nearly posted in this thread to compliment Asobo on the update process running at 50FPS and not using any noticeable GPU resources over the system idle - ~16W on my 4090. It was at about 90% when I went to bed.
However, I got up this morning and the heat and noise were immediately noticeable as soon as I walked in the room. After the update had finished, FS had been sitting at the main menu with GPU use at 200W.
Checked the options menu, and ‘low power mode’ was clearly ON.
In hindsight I could’ve used NVCP or Riva Tuner to make sure the FPS remained low. I obviously made the mistake in assuming that the low power use during the update meant things were working as intended.
I still think that minimal power use should be the absolute default state of things, without the user having to change options in the sim or use third party tools to achieve this.