Slightly OT, but my laptop sounds like a jet engine when I play Balatro. It's a 2021 Precision 5650 (lightweight CAD workstation) with a Quattro GPU and integrated graphics. Power consumption roughly doubles and both my gpus are around ~40%. I have all settings to minimum.
Same thing with many other games I'd think would be not too demanding. Thronefall, polybridge 2, etc
Thanks for the tip. I just looked and I have vsync on. On my desktop machine, it uses about 10% gpu with vsync on and 40% with vsync off. On my laptop, it's about 40% regardless of the setting.
Update: turning on vsync in Nvidia control panel did the trick, now gpu is at ~10% on my laptop. Strange to me that it overrides the application settings but i guess I'm just getting out of touch with tech stuff
One more update: I checked back later and vsync was off again. I had set it to "on" in Nvidia control panel, and after some time doing other things (not a reboot) I started Balatro and it was using a lot of GPU again - Nvidia control panel reverted to the "off" setting.
There are various reports of other utilities taking over vsync and other graphics settings (a big one is f.lux but I don't have thaty installed). I think that Dell Optimizer's "Applications" settings might have reset it, so I turned that function off (that is one difference between my Dell laptop and my homebuilt desktop). So far so good.