nvidia-smi doesn't show CUDA version even after installation

Accelerated Computing CUDA CUDA Setup and Installation
1

Hi there,

I’m setting up my environment for deep learning, however when I run the command

nvidia-smi

I don’t see cuda even though it’s installed.

x@x-Lenovo-Legion-Y530-15ICH:~$ nvidia-smi
Thu Dec 20 19:03:03 2018       
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| NVIDIA-SMI 390.87                 Driver Version: 390.87                    |
|-------------------------------+----------------------+----------------------+
| GPU  Name        Persistence-M| Bus-Id        Disp.A | Volatile Uncorr. ECC |
| Fan  Temp  Perf  Pwr:Usage/Cap|         Memory-Usage | GPU-Util  Compute M. |
|===============================+======================+======================|
|   0  GeForce GTX 105...  Off  | 00000000:01:00.0 Off |                  N/A |
| N/A   43C    P8    N/A /  N/A |    327MiB /  4040MiB |      3%      Default |
+-------------------------------+----------------------+----------------------+
                                                                               
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Processes:                                                       GPU Memory |
|  GPU       PID   Type   Process name                             Usage      |
|=============================================================================|
|    0      1525      G   /usr/lib/xorg/Xorg                           160MiB |
|    0      1703      G   /usr/bin/gnome-shell                         158MiB |
|    0      2211      G   /usr/lib/firefox/firefox                       1MiB |
|    0      2353      G   /usr/lib/firefox/firefox                       1MiB |
|    0      2415      G   /usr/lib/firefox/firefox                       1MiB |
|    0      2478      G   /usr/lib/firefox/firefox                       1MiB |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
2

The CUDA VERSION display within nvidia-smi was not added until driver 410.72

Your driver (390.87) doesn’t include this display.

Also, be aware that the CUDA VERSION displayed by nvidia-smi associated with newer drivers is the DRIVER API COMPATIBILITY VERSION. It does not indicate anything at all about what CUDA version is actually installed. A 410.72 driver will display CUDA VERSION 10.0 even when no CUDA toolkit is installed.

3

Isn’t that rather confusing? Why does it say ‘CUDA VERSION’ and not ‘CUDA COMPATIBILITY VERSION’ or something?

4

Yes, it is confusing. I wasted my 2 hours installing libraries CUDA VERSION is 10.2 as shown by nvidia-smi just to find that they don’t work and finally realize that nvcc --version is 10.0