Hi Nepherte,
FYI: the Blue Bars causing a GPU usage spike isn’t new and isn’t limited to macOS. There have been posts about this before.
Here is an HTPC NUC playing Roon client:
Win 10 NUC with Iris Pro graphics 5200. Not playing anything, Notice gpu is ~5%
I start something playing with only the bottom track bar playing animation at the bottom of the page. It increases it to ~ 12% usage:
Still not, bad, however, the moment I switch the page to the track list and get the track level blue play bars, I get an increase to ~45% usage as shown here, page switch time shown by Red arrow.:
I assume the GPU usage bump is due to the animations using the OPENGL drivers. I don’t know whether the whole page is being redrawn just for those blue bars, or, if that leap is just a processing overhead that activating the animation requires. Opening a graphics oriented video game causes similar GPU increases even if sitting at an entry screen (see below).
I do find it interesting that the welcome page of the full screen video game is taking less graphics power than the small blue bar animations.