Probably I'm doing something wrong, I don't know what, and I'm hoping you can help.
A few weeks ago, I crashed my Win10 system badly in the course of trying to record an SL session, after which I had an issue with HUDs and avatar names interfering with UI elements. I found the relevant thread on here from October, and first managed to fix it by changing the antialiasing settings, and then checked my graphics card driver and found that it'd apparently gotten knocked out. I reinstalled that, in the process updating to the latest version. I then rebooted a couple of times.
With nothing else running but the AMD graphics card software and Task Manager, I opened Cool VL Viewer. After I finished logging in, the GPU use immediately shot up to 100%; shortly thereafter, the fan started whirring loudly. This was when I was alone in my skypod, with very little within draw distance. I tried changing different graphics settings and restarting multiple times, with no noticeable change in results.
(It is entirely likely that this was the case before I updated the drivers as well, I just wasn't looking at it then.)
I assumed that this was just SL being SL, but I tried the official client to be sure...and in that, GPU use was only around 40%.
I hate the official client, so that's not really an alternative. Is there perhaps something obvious I should be doing? Any help you could provide would be most gratefully appreciated.