# How is GPU Load determined for NVIDIA cards?



## nkishan (Feb 18, 2010)

Maybe one of the software developers can answer this for me: 

I'm running some closed source CUDA kernels on my Tesla C1060. I know this generation has some limitations on scheduling kernels to run. Ideally I'd like to call these kernels from a few CPU processes that are running at the same time without overloading the GPU and its scheduler. 

How accurate is the GPU Load meter for this purpose? Can you give me any insight to the API you're using to estimate the value?

Thanks for all the work going into GPU-Z!


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## W1zzard (Feb 18, 2010)

dear driver, what's the gpu load? my gpu load is x%

no clue how accurate/reliable/anything. it gives a number that is higher when a 3d app is running and lower when no 3d app is running

read up on nvidia's performance counters, i think they are somehow exposed for cuda apps


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## nkishan (Feb 26, 2010)

My usage ranged from 0% to 30% when using one process. I parallelized the process across 6 CPU cores, but never exceeded 80% GPU load.

I looked at nvidia's performance counters, but it seems that there is no direct relationship between CUDA computation and these values.

Dr. Dobb's has a good article on this:http://www.drdobbs.com/cpp/209601096?pgno=2

Thanks for the insight.


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