New ask Hacker News story: Tell HN: High CPU time and power draw with video wallpapers in macOS Sonoma

Tell HN: High CPU time and power draw with video wallpapers in macOS Sonoma
2 by nodesocket | 0 comments on Hacker News.
As amazing as the video wallpapers, screensavers, and transitions look in the new macOS Sonoma (14.2.1) I just inspected Activity Monitor and was shocked to see the process WallpaperVideoExtension was the 3rd highest process CPU Time only behind kernel_task and WindowServer respectively. -- Process Name -- -- Kind -- -- CPU Time -- WindowServer Apple 6:25:34 kernel_task Apple 2:56:31 WallpaperVideoExtension Apple 2:09:06 spotlightknowledged Apple 48:49 It seems those beautiful videos of sunsets, beaches, and space come at a cost... That cost is CPU cycles... which is power... which is quite wasteful when in screensaver mode. I would assume once you reach "turn display off on power adapter when inactive" which I have set to 2 hours the WallpaperVideoExtension process usage goes to zero? Untested. Seems like the WallpaperVideoExtension process should be an area where Apple engineers focus on optimizing the code to be as performant as possible to save CPU and power. Why isn't this running on the GPU? Wouldn't that be much more efficient? Maybe not power efficient on GPU actually.