WebGPU-Based WiFi Simulator

When I run the Waveguide Simulator demo on my Alienware M15 Ryzen Ed. R5 (has a RTX 3070; Windows 11 Pro, Chrome v129), I hear a distinct high pitched flutter noise emanating from my laptop. I thought it was from the speakers, but no, with my volume down it was still present as long as the simulator was playing. Weird, but very cool demo (probably my hardware, never hear this during games or other WebGPU demos). The realistic house simulation yields a different signature in the sound.

That sounds like coil whine, it's a common thing to hear when GPU is working at full capacity.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetically_induced_ac...

Interesting! I have a desktop 3070 and hear the same. I don't hear anything on a Mac M1 though.

Coil whine (or capacitor whine) from the gpu running at too high a refresh rate. Easiest thing would be to use nvidia control panel to add an fps cap to something like 2x your monitors max rate for the browser (or globally). It's pretty common with any workload after like 600 fps.

As others have said, it's probably the GPU power supply circuits making the sound; if the pattern of power consumption has frequencies in the audible range, it can cause components like inductors and capacitors to mechanically vibrate at those frequencies and emit sound. The reason you don't hear it in games is either due to the game audio being much louder or the power pattern not having those audible frequencies.

CPU power circuitry can do the same, but given this is using the GPU, it's a safe assumption that it's the latter.

I get the same coil whine on my laptop (AMD Radeon Mobile GPU) whenever I run GPU heavy code.