Does anyone know of a GPU monitoring tool? I am trying to find one that tells you if the GPU is actually doing something. Right now the only way that I know we can sniff this out is to look at the temperatures of the cores to see if they are running "hot"...

I tried a debug tool off the Nvidia site but it seemed to be oriented towards being used to debug graphics applications ... besides I really only need to know if the GPU is running tasks ...

There's no direct way that I know of, only incidentals. Clock speed and GPU temp are usually a pretty good indicator of the current load on the GPU. GPU-Z is a nice lightweight program to see all that.

actually there is a Cuda-Z app available for download from sourceforge, just google search cuda-z which gives info about the gpu core performance

actually there is a Cuda-Z app available for download from sourceforge, just google search cuda-z which gives info about the gpu core performance

GPU-Z.

Go to the Sensors tab and it shows GPU Load. Not sure how it works this out though and how accurate it is.

RivaTuner also has a GPU Usage meter.

GPU-Z.

Go to the Sensors tab and it shows GPU Load. Not sure how it works this out though and how accurate it is.

RivaTuner also has a GPU Usage meter.

Would this do any good?:
Perfhud 6 GPU Performance Analysis

Regards,

Rob

Paul on the Riva Tuner Main Tab look just under where you select the GPU and it will say something like (off my ATI machine but heh) 256-bit RV770. At the end of this field is a small button looking like a 3,4,5 triangle. Select that and a mini popup bar opens. On the end is Hardware Monitoring. This will open graphs for each present GPU and you will see GPU Usage is one of them.

Paul on the Riva Tuner Main Tab look just under where you select the GPU and it will say something like (off my ATI machine but heh) 256-bit RV770. At the end of this field is a small button looking like a 3,4,5 triangle. Select that and a mini popup bar opens. On the end is Hardware Monitoring. This will open graphs for each present GPU and you will see GPU Usage is one of them.

Would this do any good?:
Perfhud 6 GPU Performance Analysis

Regards,

Rob

Well, I don't think the problem is only in our imagination Paul...
Since I got my HD4870 fo Milkyway, I swapped the GTX 260 in my Linux box with another 8800GT card. During the GPUGRID server outage I had some time to watch the tasks running. I watched two pxxx-GIANNI- tasks that started at the exactly same time. The weird thing is they needed the same wall-clock time to complete (also CPU time, which should be different for these cards)!
I'd say the GTX260 should be a little bit faster than a 8800GT! ;-)

The host where I saw this is - http://www.gpugrid.net/results.php?hostid=32169. BOINC client version is 6.6.20 for Linux x86_64.

Looking at the stderr of the last four results (521310,521292,521244,521238) I completed during the server outage, I noticed that the WUs never ever only ran on one GPU. They always switched between the two cards. Some WUs only once, and some more often... But actually my "switch between applications every x minutes" is set to 1440 minutes (=24 hours, but that's ignored by BOINC anyway it seems) and there was nothing in deadline trouble. Nothing was running at "high priority", so there never shouldn't be any task switching between the two cards. To me it looks that this is slowing down the computation a good bit...

[edit]Sorry Paul, I know it's off-topic in this thread, but I just wanted to show you that it looks like there's really something wrong with the GPU scheduling if you have two ot more (different) cards in one computer...
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Well, I don't think the problem is only in our imagination Paul...

...

[edit]Sorry Paul, I know it's off-topic in this thread, but I just wanted to show you that it looks like there's really something wrong with the GPU scheduling if you have two ot more (different) cards in one computer...

Try EVGA Precision on EVGA.com, not availaible for monitoring exact ressources GPUs are given, but a really interesting tool to monitor Temps and OC.

Good point MrS I looked on my ATI machine. When I switched backt to the nVidia machine I lost the GPU Utilization monitors :(

Sorry Paul my bad.

I also have multiple GPU's and the id of the GPU would be useful indeed.

Good point MrS I looked on my ATI machine. When I switched backt to the nVidia machine I lost the GPU Utilization monitors :(

Sorry Paul my bad.

I also have multiple GPU's and the id of the GPU would be useful indeed.

Good point MrS I looked on my ATI machine. When I switched backt to the nVidia machine I lost the GPU Utilization monitors :(

Sorry Paul my bad.

I also have multiple GPU's and the id of the GPU would be useful indeed.

I just found this very good article on how to use Performance Monitor (and various other tools) to view the Nvidia cards various performance indicators.

I downloaded Perfkit 6.5 from here

Rob

I just found this very good article on how to use Performance Monitor (and various other tools) to view the Nvidia cards various performance indicators.

I downloaded Perfkit 6.5 from here

Rob

@ETA, with RivaTuner you can create an underclocked profile, and your normal profile, plus any extras you might want. Then in the scheduler you can set a trigger for the underclocked profile if the hardware acceleration monitor is 0, or your normal profile if the hardware accel monitor is 1.
On Vista I use Aero, so the HW accel monitor is always on 1; I use framerate as an indicator instead. The framerate is 0 while using CUDA and Aero, so you can rev your card back up for games.

Personally I have two ways of running my hot 8800GT:
- Games I run my 120% overclock with auto fan from the launcher (disable scheduler)
- For crunching I set my fan level manually depending on the amount of noise I can stand, and then have downclocking thresholds set up so that the GPU runs as fast as poss. without getting too hot (not over 83C), and leave it on overnight etc. A constant fan isn't so annoying as a fan constantly oscillating its speed, even by a small amount.

I know this a late reply. I am posting this just for the sake of completing the thread. I think the nvidia-smi is an answer to your problem.