I just discovered something about GPU rendering you might not know...
Tako Yakida
Posts: 548
And if you do know this already, good on you. I had been struggling with this issue for about a year, but today thought I would search newly for a solution. Turns out it's not really an issue after all.
For those of you who don't know this, this might come as a relief, or a shock that it was so obvious.
Without further ado....
I have discovered that while it appeared that my GPU was being barely utilized during a GPU render, with percentages in the task manager under 5%, it was actually the CUDA cores that were being utilized and were indeed almost 100% utilized.
There is a drop down in the 3D section of the task manager. Select CUDA and voila, you can see how much your render is actually using. Hope this helps clear up some confusion for some people here.
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Comments
and the solution to make sure gpu being used how does one verify that?
install GPU-Z
Nvidia-SMI.
It's a command line tool, but comes with the driver package of nvidia cards(mostly).
Gpu-z, while a good tool, has a tendency to not report correct information(neither does Taskmanager) in certain situations, such as mixed gpus.
Nvidia-smi --loop=3.
MSI Afterburner also gives you accurate readings.
Cheers,
Alex.
Checking the Log (Help->Troubleshooting->View Log File), if one pins the log to the taskbar, it can easily be opened whenever.
When you start the render watch the progress window, the small one that pops up, and it willl say if it is using CPU to render.
If you want to monitor your hardware, I recommend one of the two tools
HWMonitor:
https://www.cpuid.com/softwares/hwmonitor.html
Open Hardware Monitor:
https://openhardwaremonitor.org/
...I prefer it as it also allows you to adjust the card's fan speeds.
I always have GPU-Z and MSI afterburner on.
GPU-z to monitor my GPU temps and VRAM temps as well as Power usage.
MSI afterburner for undervolting my GPU as well as fan speed control on my GPU
Also to note that for win 10 21h1 users instead of Cuda it simply says 3D...
In Task Manager?
There is a down arrow tab you can click on to switch it to Cuda report.