Way to monitor GPU utilization?

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pwnt

Weaksauce
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Jul 31, 2007
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Is there a software that allows GPU utilization like we can see CPU utilization in Windows task manager?

I'd like to be able to check on graphical tasks the computer is performing is being handled by video card or not.

For example, if I'm playing back H.264 item on YouTube, and have Flash 10.1 installed, I'd like to be able to check hardware acceleration utilization.
 
pwnt said:
Is there a software that allows GPU utilization like we can see CPU utilization in Windows task manager?
Click to expand...
GPU-Z, however..
pwnt said:
For example, if I'm playing back H.264 item on YouTube, and have Flash 10.1 installed, I'd like to be able to check hardware acceleration utilization.
Click to expand...

Do keep in mind that what GPU-Z reports may not be very accurate. Depending on the GPU/software, you can't be sure if GPU-Z is reporting accurate usage as the GPU could be doing the work on its core or by the shader pipeline.
 
I in fact have an ATI Radeon, but Catalyst doesn't show utilization data. I looked around in the control itself and on the web and found nothing
 
MSI Afterburner... I always have it running along with my task manager on my 2nd monitor when gaming. It'll give you temps, utilization voltage, fan speed and even in-game FPS. I only wish it showed VRAM utilization.

You don't have to have an MSI card to use it either.
 
pwnt said:
I in fact have an ATI Radeon, but Catalyst doesn't show utilization data. I looked around in the control itself and on the web and found nothing
Click to expand...

Yes it does. Under ATI overdrive, just under the temperature meter, there's another meter labeled 'Activity'.
 
after a little search, looks like there is no way to monitor GPU Usage for Nvidia cards (at least mine), though I’ve seen screenshots for the same tools with an additional GPU Usage graph when used with the same tools.
don’t know if this is because there is no hardware GPU usage performance counter in Nvidia GPUs, or maybe I need to try some Developer tools like NVIDIA PerfKit (NVPerfHUD) which looks very complicated, or NVIDIA System Monitor (8800 GTX: 1, 2).
 
I'm not all that sure that a utilization monitor would be all that useful because what would it monitor? There are multiple things in a GPU that could max out and limit performance. Memory bandwidth, shaders, ROPs, etc. Depending on the kind of job it is being asked to do one of those could be slammed, limiting performance, while the others have plenty of power to spare. So no matter which you monitor you could have situations of a GPU being not "100%" used, despite being limited by something internally.
 
Sycraft said:
I'm not all that sure that a utilization monitor would be all that useful because what would it monitor? There are multiple things in a GPU that could max out and limit performance. Memory bandwidth, shaders, ROPs, etc. Depending on the kind of job it is being asked to do one of those could be slammed, limiting performance, while the others have plenty of power to spare. So no matter which you monitor you could have situations of a GPU being not "100%" used, despite being limited by something internally.
Click to expand...

The same thing can be said for CPU utilization but we still like to monitor that ;)
 
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