I love visualizations as much as the next person, but even with just the album artwork displayed, Plexamp is smashing my Radeon Pro 580X at 30-50%. Part of why I use Plexamp is because I want an extremely minimal player–which means low resource usage as well. By comparison, VLC playing the same song uses next to nothing.
Running mine on a 2017 5K iMac w/ AMD Radeon Pro 575.
I can see the GPU usage depending a lot on what visualizer I’m using – most range around 5-8% (+5% during transitions)… down to <1% if I’m just displaying the cover.
Exception seems to be w/ Tahitian Pearls which indeed pushes the GPU usage to approx. 40%.
I take it your comparison to VLC isn’t that serious as VLC isn’t showing much of visualization in the first place (certainly no comparison to those in Plexamp – and apparently dropping the sound whenever you switch visualizer)… that being said their visualizers seem to use 2-3% of my GPU
TL;DR: if you want to minimize the GPU impact… click on the visualization and all you’ll get is the album poster of the track currently playing. Further shrink the window and even that’ll go away – giving you the true minimalist player experience 
I’m guessing there’s a bug or something that affects mine, because–as I said–I had the album artwork displayed. The comparison with VLC was apt.
I deleted and reinstalled Plexamp and now it’s behaving!
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