High GPU usage from Cursor and DWM on Windows 10 with WSL2

Support Bug Reports
1

Description:
Since version 0.51 and continuing into version 1.0, Cursor IDE has been causing extremely high GPU usage on my machine. After launching Cursor with cursor . from my WSL2 bash terminal, my GPU load spikes close to 100 percent. Task Manager shows about half of that usage from Cursor and the other half from Desktop Window Manager. When I close Cursor, DWM usage drops to zero immediately.

Steps to reproduce:

  1. Use Windows 10 with WSL2
  2. Launch Cursor from the WSL2 terminal with cursor .
  3. Give the agent something to do that involves code edits
  4. Repeat step 3 a few times
  5. Observe GPU usage in Task Manager

System info:

  • Windows 10
  • Cursor version 1.0 (problem started around version 0.51)
  • WSL2
  • All extensions disabled except WSL extension

Does this prevent you from using Cursor?
Yes. The GPU usage is so high that Cursor becomes almost unusable.

3

same issue

5

Quick follow-up:
The GPU spike seems tied to agent activity. Like when it’s doing tool calls or waiting for me to approve a command, GPU is the highest. But after that, even when it’s idle again, GPU usage stays high until I close Cursor.

7

I’m facing the same issue here as well (however this is on windows 11)

9

Experiencing same

11

Press Ctrl+Shift+P and select Preferences: Configure Runtime Arguments. This will open Cursor’s argv.json file. Simply uncomment the line // "disable-hardware-acceleration": true to enable it.

13

This seems to have fixed the problem in my case, my GPU was always at 50% usage, even when doing nothing, now it seems returned to 0%, let’s see in the next days if this last.