Quadro 6000: grafic + CUDA at the same time?

Hi

i’m new to the topic of GPU computing and have one first question:

If i would have a Quadro 6000 card with good DP-performance in my workstation:
can i use it for demanding OpenGL/DirectX graphic and for intensive GPU-computing at the same time?

e.g. solving FEM simlations in background process (GPU Ansys) while modeling 3D-CAD (Solidworks/Catia)

Or do I have to do something like switching a driver for this different purposes?

What happens to the card memory? Is it dynamically aligned or is it fully blocked by one of these applications?

Best regards

HPVD

It is not blocked at the application level, but rather at the kernel level, so you can’t process a given frame at the same time that you run a kernel, but you can interleave kernels and GUI

Thanks for your answer.

What does this mean in practice?

Could I use 3d-applications (CAD) during GPU-computing (FEM) - but with very poor performance?

And what about 2d applications like using MS Office or browsing the web?

Would there be a "norma"l user experience for scrolling a page during GPU-computing on the same graphic-card?

Best regards

HPVD

If your kernels are not too long, there will be a normal user experience. Below about 25fps you will start seeing degradation (games may require a bit more). So if your kernels run for longer than 40ms you will start seeing degradation in performance.

I don’t have experience with that kind of workload but you can’t give 100% GPU to both CAD and FEM, so if they both try to run at 100% at the same time, you’ll see degradation. The performance won’t be very poor, it’s a powerful card and with two applications, even if they try to run full force at the same time you still get 50% each. 2d applications will mainly be affected by the frame rate, so you need to make sure that you’re kernels are below about 40ms per run.