What is the benefit of Persistence Mode?

Accelerated Computing CUDA CUDA Programming and Performance
1

Hi all

I’m going to set up an Ubuntu 16.04 headless server for transcoding videoes. Therefore I added a Nvidia Geforce GTX 1060 card to the server having in mind to use ffmpeg in combination with the GPU.

I have installed the driver using the Nvidia package method. Then I generated a edid and an xorg.conf file, in order to set up a headless environment.

When I looked for some howtos for setting up headless, I always found hints about “Persistence Mode”. But I never found information about the benefits of persistence mode.

Would it be an advantage to have the GPU in persistence mode for transcoding videos? I use ffmpeg in a bash script.

Kind regards, Roland

2

It reduces the need to ‘warm up’ the GPU when your program starts, so it will start up faster (the GPU essentially remains always ready).