How can I identify which processes are using the GPU?

Question

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.

score 19 · Accepted Answer · answered Apr 21 '13 at 01:41

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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

answered Apr 21 '13 at 01:41

Mahmoud Al-Qudsi

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how can you tell if it is the dedicated gpu or the intel gpu? – Mikey Mar 25 '19 at 13:02

score 8 · Answer 2 · answered Apr 21 '13 at 06:12

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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

answered Apr 21 '13 at 06:12

magicandre1981

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By process or just total? – Mahmoud Al-Qudsi Apr 21 '13 at 17:56
hover over the high spikes in the graph and you get a tooltip. But the tool also offers a GPU column. – magicandre1981 Apr 21 '13 at 18:52
@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 Mar 06 '17 at 12:02
Is this still the best resource? – moondra Nov 21 '17 at 02:49
@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 Nov 21 '17 at 16:29
Thanks. I downloaded it. Going to fiddle around with it. – moondra Nov 21 '17 at 16:31
@moondra ok, also setup the plugins to have more functionality. – magicandre1981 Nov 21 '17 at 16:49

score 1 · Answer 3 · answered Apr 21 '13 at 00:55

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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

answered Apr 21 '13 at 00:55

Brad Patton

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Thanks, but you misunderstand my question - I need to identify the *process* responsible for the GPU load. – Mahmoud Al-Qudsi Apr 21 '13 at 01:39
Ah relied more on the title. I'm going to edit it to be more clear. – Brad Patton Apr 21 '13 at 02:10

How can I identify which processes are using the GPU?

3 Answers3