Is there a way to monitor GPU usage?

[Millz]

As the subject suggests..

Is there a way (or some software) that you can see what usage the graphics card is under? I run 4 sessions on my main PC with a 8800GTX card (and a 5th session on a different machine), and want to know how much my graphics card is being hammered..

Cheers

[zanthor]

Saddly there isn't as far as I've been able to find. This would be a GREAT tool because you could tell if your GFX card is sitting idle or not. As it is I've replaced my GPU in the past with the hopes of gaining performance only to be disappointed at the new card performing the same as the old... chasing bottlenecks sucks.

[-silencer-]

?

The easy way to test if it's being stressed is to add more detail to the windows and see if your frames drop. If they don't, you were CPU limited in the previous settings/resolution. If they do, you're pushing your GPU as fast as it will go. That's how you know if you're being limited while reviewing hardware - just check the fps/performance charts of videocard reviews.

If a chart has 4 resolutions: 1024, 1280, 1680, 1920.. and the fps curve looks like this:
145fps, 145fps, 128fps, 64fps..
Then you're CPU limited at 1024x768, and GPU limited above that.. with the possibility of GPU limit at 1280.
That's why a lot of high-end cards have fps curves like this without AA enabled:
150fps, 148fps, 148fps, 147fps.. if it's flat, the GPU isn't what's holding back performance.

[Pippin]

Weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

video card power usage


A simple google search proved that GPUz may infact do what you need it to do.

[magwo]

You can try using Nvidia Perfhud:
http://developer.nvidia.com/object/nvperfhud_home.html


It might take some tinkering to make it work.. but it's a great tool for discovering where your bottlenecks lie. In particular, you can study the distribution of time spent in Driver/GPU in relation to total frame time.

[zanthor]

video card power usage[/url]


A simple google search proved that GPUz may infact do what you need it to do.

Where does GPU-Z show GPU usage? I see ALL sorts of useful stats about current settings, and not a damn thing about current LOAD. The sensors page shows GPU Core Clock and GPU Memory Clock but I wouldn't expect either of these fluxuate UNLESS you are OCing.

Am I missing something?

[zanthor]

You can try using Nvidia Perfhud:
http://developer.nvidia.com/object/nvperfhud_home.html


It might take some tinkering to make it work.. but it's a great tool for discovering where your bottlenecks lie. In particular, you can study the distribution of time spent in Driver/GPU in relation to total frame time.

This may be the moneyshot.

[magwo]

I've been working with this stuff this week at work.. our game is GPU bound on most systems which makes Direct3D behave badly. What happens is that the command buffer fills up, then it might happen that the card is issued by Windows to redraw some 2D stuff, which causes weirdness to the command queue and causes calls to GPU stuff block randomly for long periods of time. This in turn causes a choppy framerate with "spikes".

[Millz]

You can try using Nvidia Perfhud:
http://developer.nvidia.com/object/nvperfhud_home.html


It might take some tinkering to make it work.. but it's a great tool for discovering where your bottlenecks lie. In particular, you can study the distribution of time spent in Driver/GPU in relation to total frame time.

Woot. This is the kind of thing i was looking for. I'm just trying to see where the bottle neck is for dalaran on my machine.. CPU and RAM are fine, so i'm looking more to HDD or graphics card atm. I can still run around fine etc in dalaran, except it drops to around 20fps, would be nice to get that bumped up a bit

I'll give the PerfHUD a go and see what it looks like. Cheers.

[zanthor]

I played with this briefly, it appears you have to change the application to support it. Such that it's not functional with WoW.