How to see if Cuda is working?

Hi,

this is my first post on this forum, after having made several unsuccessful searches.

I have a brand new PC, with a GTX 460 graphics card, an i7-950 CPU, 4GB DDR3 RAM, and Windows 7 64 bit.
The nVidia control panel says I have the 258.96 version of the driver.

Several things make me think that Cuda is not working:

  • Sony Vegas Movie Studio Platinum HD (a movie editor software), does not go faster when I activate the GPU computing based on Cuda for rendering movies
  • the monitoring tool GPU-z shows 0% of GPU usage when rendering is activated
  • another video encoding software, TMPGenc 4 Xpress, only shows 10% of GPU usage on GPU-z when converting movies, while it claims to be able to leverage Cuda (and the auto-calibration option says it can allocate 50% of the workload to the GPU, and 50% to the CPU)
  • I have been said that Windows 7 can by default lock some graphical resources which make Cuda unusable to other software, so it could be true on my machine.
  • I have read that Badaboom is not currently working with the GTX 460/470/480 graphics card, which makes me think that these graphics card (including mine) have a specific version of Cuda, which might not be recognized by other Cuda-enabled software.

So, I am wondering why I can’t get more of my GPU, and I would like you to help me:

  • how can I test that Cuda is working: which program can I install and run to load the GPU at its maximum, and which other program could show me that the GPU is actually working (and not the CPU only)?

  • do I have something to do on my Windows settings (or BIOS ??) to activate Cuda?

Many thanks in advance for your help!
Bfredo123

I’m very new to programming with CUDA but here’s what I would try:

Download and install the CUDA SDK and Toolkit. Once these are installed, there are example programs in C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\NVIDIA Corporation\NVIDIA GPU Computing SDK\C\bin\win32\Release. Refer to the Windows quick start guide in the developer downloads list (http://developer.nvidia.com/object/cuda_3_2_toolkit_rc.html#Windows%20XP,%20Windows%20Vista%20and%20Windows7)

Not sure if this would tell you if GPU is being under-utilized but could give you a better picture of what’s going on.

Also check that the driver is the latest one.

I’m very new to programming with CUDA but here’s what I would try:

Download and install the CUDA SDK and Toolkit. Once these are installed, there are example programs in C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\NVIDIA Corporation\NVIDIA GPU Computing SDK\C\bin\win32\Release. Refer to the Windows quick start guide in the developer downloads list (http://developer.nvidia.com/object/cuda_3_2_toolkit_rc.html#Windows%20XP,%20Windows%20Vista%20and%20Windows7)

Not sure if this would tell you if GPU is being under-utilized but could give you a better picture of what’s going on.

Also check that the driver is the latest one.

Many thanks!

This is what I tried, but when I start the samples, it claims that i need the 259.x driver, which actually is a development driver, and then it stops.

I did not install this dev driver because I would not like my pc to become unstable.

Do u know what a dev driver changes compared to the official, non-dec, latest one? (the one i have indeed)

Thanks for your help!

Bfredo123

Many thanks!

This is what I tried, but when I start the samples, it claims that i need the 259.x driver, which actually is a development driver, and then it stops.

I did not install this dev driver because I would not like my pc to become unstable.

Do u know what a dev driver changes compared to the official, non-dec, latest one? (the one i have indeed)

Thanks for your help!

Bfredo123