Search code examples
windowsgpunvidiawindows-server-2016taskmanager

Windows server 2016 Task Manager GPU perfromance using RDP


I have a Windows server 2016 VM, running with NVIDIA Tesla T4 attached to it. I'm connecting to the VM using RDP. I have configured the NVIDIA driver in version 474.30. Windows is able to detect the GPU card and the driver is installed successfully (can see the GPU in the Device Manager under Display adapters with the driver configured). I can run nvidia-smi from within the VM and I can see some processes running on it and some utilization. I can't understand the GPU utilization in Task Manager in the Performance tab. I checked using dxdiag.exe that the driver model is WDDM 2.1 which is sufficient for Windows requirements.

The windows server 2016 version 1607 OS build version is 14393.3443. In some places it says that this feature of GPU utilization in task manager is only available in version 1709. Reference:

  1. https://devblogs.microsoft.com/directx/gpus-in-the-task-manager/
  2. https://www.groovypost.com/news/microsoft-windows-10-fall-creators-update-1709-top-features/

This is about windows 10 and not about windows server 2016.

I also saw that the GPU performance might not be available while using RDP.

Do you know if a newer windows server version is needed or GPU performance can't be seen while using RDP?

Thanks


Solution

  • Windows Server 2016 version 1607 OS doesn't show GPU performance under Task Manager.
    That functionality was indeed added as a feature to Windows Server version 1709 OS and later, and is also available in Windows 10 and later Desktop versions.

    You could use several out-of-the-box tools for monitoring GPU performance from a guest VM, such as nvidia-smi, Windows Performance Counters, and NVWMI.

    For further reading visit NVIDIA's official documentation.

    As for displaying GPU performance while connecting to the guest VM using RDP, all you need to do is to install the relevant NVIDIA GPU driver for your use case, and you'd see it just fine.

    Download the driver through NVIDIA's official website.