Codex desktop app is very power-hungry and uses lots of CPU + GPU

What version of the Codex App are you using (From “About Codex” dialog)?

260205.1301 (554)

What subscription do you have?

ChatGPT Plus

What issue are you seeing?

Installed the Codex app and started using it. Almost immediately I noticed that when Codex app is actively doing stuff, my laptop gets hotter. I used the "Stats" app + Activity Monitor to check some statistics, and it's pretty damning.

When idle (just some background apps, no work) my laptop uses 4-5W as reported by Stats.

When I launch Codex and tell it to do something, just the animations/etc of the app itself (!) make it use almost 50-60% of a single CPU core + heavy GPU load with all the animations, and the total power usage rises to 15-20W (so, a +15W increase simply from the Codex app).

Almost the entirety of the CPU usage comes from the Renderer process + GPU usage from the WindowServer process (since it has to render all the Codex stuff).

What steps can reproduce the bug?

Start the Codex app. Tell it to do something. When it starts going, somehow the animations of the text streaming/shimmering are enough to make a modern MacBook hot.

What is the expected behavior?

No such heavy battery/CPU usage. Cursor/VSCode and lots of other Electron apps do not have this issue. Codex TUI (obviously) does not have this issue.

Additional information

MacBook Pro 14" with M4 Pro (12c)
macOS version - 26.2 (stable)

/Applications/Codex.app/Contents/MacOS/Codex --force-prefers-reduced-motion

cat > /tmp/codex-reduced-motion.applescript <<'APPLESCRIPT'
on run
  do shell script "osascript -e 'tell application \"Codex\" to quit' >/dev/null 2>&1; sleep 0.7; open -na \"Codex\" --args --force-prefers-reduced-motion"
end run
APPLESCRIPT

osacompile -o "/Applications/Codex Reduced Motion.app" /tmp/codex-reduced-motion.applescript