How can I identify which processes are using the GPU?

Is there any way to find out which process is using the GPU for intensive calculations? (OpenCL, CUDA, etc? Primarily OpenCL?)

e.g. if you run an OpenCL-powered video transcoder, you'll see nothing in your task manager that tells your GPU is burning through data at a ridiculous rate - though your fans will have kicked into overdrive.

If the reply is driver-specific, I am interested in nVidia primarily.

Mahmoud Al-Qudsi

Posted 2013-04-21T00:40:11.657

Reputation: 3 274

Answers

Turns out Sysinternals' Process Explorer can do this (of course it can, there's nothing it can't do, apparently!).

Process Explorer GPU load by process

Mahmoud Al-Qudsi

Posted 2013-04-21T00:40:11.657

Reputation: 3 274

how can you tell if it is the dedicated gpu or the intel gpu? – Mikey – 2019-03-25T13:02:06.657

Process Hacker, the open source alternative to Process Explorer, also shows the GPU usage.

Press CTRL+I to get the system information Window and click on the GPU Tab, so get a graph with the GPU usage.

enter image description here

magicandre1981

Posted 2013-04-21T00:40:11.657

Reputation: 86 560

@magicandre1981 Worked for me better than Process Explorer; Make sure you select all nodes there; after that you can add GPU usage column to the process list. Make sure you run it elevated. – Anton Krouglov – 2017-03-06T12:02:02.143

Is this still the best resource? – moondra – 2017-11-21T02:49:31.893

@moondra ProcessHacker also allows you to add the GPU column to see which process use GPU. I prefer ProcessHacker because it is open source compared to Process Explorer. – magicandre1981 – 2017-11-21T16:29:22.813

Thanks. I downloaded it. Going to fiddle around with it. – moondra – 2017-11-21T16:31:09.647

@moondra ok, also setup the plugins to have more functionality. – magicandre1981 – 2017-11-21T16:49:15.010

By process or just total? – Mahmoud Al-Qudsi – 2013-04-21T17:56:53.043

hover over the high spikes in the graph and you get a tooltip. But the tool also offers a GPU column. – magicandre1981 – 2013-04-21T18:52:39.617

AMD Catalyst Control Center has an indicator of GPU activity in the Performance section. I would assume nVidia software has a similar output. It's usually associated with overclocking.

enter image description here

Otherwise you can download the free GPU-Z. It includes a GPU Load output.

enter image description here

Brad Patton

Posted 2013-04-21T00:40:11.657

Reputation: 9 939

1Thanks, but you misunderstand my question - I need to identify the process responsible for the GPU load. – Mahmoud Al-Qudsi – 2013-04-21T01:39:05.873

Ah relied more on the title. I'm going to edit it to be more clear. – Brad Patton – 2013-04-21T02:10:03.173