Ok.
Is TDP the same as "Normalized Total Power" in Precision X1 ? (See picture: 119%)
There's also "Total Power" and "GPU Usage".
Which one is the original post referring to?
I don't have a horse in the game but total gpu power and total gpu power normalized values in Hwinfo have "% of TDP" in parenthesis. This would make me believe they are a measure of TDP instead of actual power usage. I couldn't say whether Precision X1 measures it this way. As I understand it power consumption and TDP are related but not the same.
I don't typically have power usage displayed in monitoring software because I wouldn't trust it as far as I can throw it. So I'm hardly an "expert" on how it's measured. Not that anything in software monitoring is much beyond a general ballpark.
As noted it sounds like the OP isn't talking about power usage though. They're speaking about GPU usage. Aka, after patching the game
and updating GPU drivers the game is hammering the GPU more than it had been before.
In the OP's case it would appear the answer to the question of "What changed?" is they updated the game and their GPU drivers. From the standpoint of troubleshooting it logically follows one of those two changes are the culprit. Thus, undoing them would be the obvious starting point. A driver rollback would be an easy one to check. A patch rollback, if possible, would be the other.