No GPU utilization? CUDA Particle Example

Hi everyone,

I’ve started looking at the particle example supplied with CUDA 5.5 and have run into an issue when I try and compile it. When I build the example with VS 2010 I get no errors but when I run it performance is terrible; Its running at around ~20FPS. I checked GPU utilization and its almost 0%, but CPU utilization is 25% and one core is maxed out. When I run the Nvidia supplied .exe everything runs great, right around ~300FPS and up to 50% GPU usage. Should I try a makefile or is my environment not setup properly

My System:
Dell M6600
NVIDIA Quadro 3000M
Intel i7 2620 @2.7GHz
Windows 7 64bit
Visual Studio 2010 and 2012

did you make sure you’ve built the Release version and not the Debug one?

the one CPU core may have been maxed out due to busy polling on a blocking cuda API call such as cudaMemcpy().

Low performance would be explained by having a Debug build. It turns off all compiler optimizations and puts most local variables into local memory.

Christian

Thank you, I’ve never really used visual studio so this is a new environment for me.

I thought I tried doing a release build but I guess not, that solved it though thanks.