Nouveau doesn't release GPU
Nouveau doesn't seem to release the GPU when the Nvidia drivers do. I'm playing Forge or Empires (FOE) using Brave-browser. Brave is derived from Chomium, all the Chromium browsers show this issue.
At first performance was terrible so I changed chrome://flags to "enable software rendering list" This option enables GPU acceleration. That fixed the terrible performance.
The only issue I noticed was that if I stayed on the browser tab running FOE, switched to another desk, then tried to do anything in a terminal, that terminal would display text really slowly.
If I instead I switched to another browser tab then used a terminal, everything was fine.
So, to experiment, I installed the Nvidia drivers. The Nvidia drivers seem to release the GPU when I switch to another desk and don't show the slow performance so I don't have to switch to anther tab.
So it looks to me like the Nvidia drivers release the GPU on a loss of focus instead of on a tab switch. A minor inconvience but I thought it would be helpful if I reported it.
I'm using FC 32, Fvwm2.