CODEWITHSUNDEEP
linuxmacoscudagpu
MAS
MAS

Reputation: 4993

Saving GPU memory by bypassing GUI

I have a mac book pro with a 2 Gb Nvidia GPU. I am trying to utilize all my GPU memory for computations (python code). How much saving I may get if I bypassed the GUI interface and only accessed my machine through command line. I want to know if such a thing would save me a good amount of GPU memory?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 129

Answers (1)

Robert Crovella
Robert Crovella

Reputation: 151839

The difference probably won't be huge.

A GPU that is only hosting a console display will only typically have ~5-25 megabytes of memory reserved out of the total memory size. On the other hand, a GPU that is hosting a GUI display (using the NVIDIA GPU driver) might typically have ~50 megabytes or more reserved for display use (this may vary somewhat based on the size of the display attached).

So you can probably get a good "estimate" of the savings by running nvidia-smi and looking at the difference between total and available memory for your GPU with the GUI running. If that is, for example, 62MB, then you can probably "recover" around 40-50MB by shutting off the GUI, for example on linux switching to runlevel 3.

I just ran this experiment on a linux laptop with a Quadro3000M that happens to have 2GB of memory. With the X display up and NVIDIA GPU driver loaded, the "used" memory was 62MB out of 2047MB (reported by nvidia-smi).

When I switch to runlevel 3 (X is not started) the memory usage dropped to about 4MB. That probably means that ~50MB additional is available to CUDA.

A side benefit of shutting off the GUI might be the elimination of the display watchdog.

Upvotes: 3

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