Why does my ThinkPad P53’s fans ramp up and CPU usage spike for no reason on Ubuntu?

Hey everyone,

I’m kinda confused and could use some help understanding what’s going on here. I recently installed Ubuntu 24.04 LTS on my Lenovo ThinkPad P53 (i9-9880H + Quadro RTX 4000 Max-Q, 78 GB RAM).

Everything works fine, but sometimes my fans go crazy and CPU shoots up to 100 % usage even when I’m not doing anything heavy.

I checked with htop, and I see a bunch of processes like this:
/proc/self/exe --type=gpu-process --disable-gpu-sandbox --crashpad-handler...

They usually appear when I open VS Code or Brave browser, and each one uses 40–50 % of a core.

I’m using the NVIDIA 580 proprietary driver, and nvidia-smi shows the GPU is active even when idle. Temps go up, fans spin louder, and the laptop gets hot, even though I’m literally just looking at code or a browser tab.

Does anyone know why this happens or how to stop it?

Is it some NVIDIA driver thing, Ubuntu issue, or maybe how VS Code/Brave use the GPU?

Any advice or explanation would be awesome — I really like using Linux but this part is confusing me.

Thanks in advance 🙏