How to know what cards allow TCC mode?

I’ve recently purchased a Dell Precision laptop with a Quadro M1000M card. The OS is Windows 7 SP1. I did expect it to allow TCC mode but instead I get this behavior;

C:\Program Files\NVIDIA Corporation\NVSMI>nvidia-smi -g 0 -fdm 1
Unable to set driver model for GPU 0000:01:00.0: Not Supported
Treating as warning and moving on.
All done.

So is this card supposed to support TCC mode? And a more general question, how to tell before purchase whether or not TCC is supported by a given card?

Most laptop GPUs currently are in an “Optimus” configuration. This means that the GPU plays a role in driving the laptop windows display.

GPUs servicing a display cannot be placed into TCC mode.

TCC mode should be available for Tesla GPUs, most Quadro desktop GPUs, and GeForce Titan family (desktop) GPUs. In order to enable TCC mode on any of these devices, the GPU cannot be involved in driving a display.

If you need to know before purchase whether a GPU supports TCC mode, my suggestion would be to test it in the configuration you care about. If that’s not possible, seek out someone who has the GPU and can test it for you. You can also check with the community on forums like these for guidance.

The actual support matrix can change over time. For example, Titan GPUs were originally not supported. The support for Titan GPUs in TCC mode was added as part of a particular driver release some time ago.

Thank you for this very helpful reply. We do have experience with the Dell M4800 laptop with K2200 Quadro cards and these do support TCC mode which led me to believe it may also be possible on the newer 7510 model.

To give some context, we have developed some mathematical models that use Cuda and would like to experiment with different configurations and measure performance benefits. It is still new to us and I’m not ready to go down the Tesla route yet (mainly because of the cost).

My interest in TCC mode is to avoid the Windows timeout problem when running quite demanding Cuda calculations.

We do have some desktops with Quadro cards and these can be run in TCC mode and accessed via remote desktop - this works very well.

We also have some desktops with quite powerful Geforce cards (not Titan). I would like to try adding another card to be dedicated to Cuda calculations. One question is whether this avoids the timeout issue in that the current card would be polled by Windows rather than the new, secondary one? If so then would it be possible to buy a relatively low end card for the graphics and dedicate the existing card to Cuda? The PCs have gaming type configurations with Gigabyte motherboards and multiple slots.

If this is not possible then would it be possible with a TCC supported card - like Quadro or the latest Titan X?

Optimus is a catch-all term for the design of a laptop GPU to assist the intel integrated graphics, however the exact design strategy (and therefore usage ramifications) varies by laptop, as well as by OS. Newer OS (e.g. win10) have recognized this hybrid graphics scenario and have specific support features for it, for example.

Anyway, this means that an Optimus GPU may be essentially a stand-alone GPU that can be placed in TCC mode, or it can mean that its design is so intertwined (both from a HW and SW perspective) with the integrated graphics that it is really not a standalone GPU and cannot be placed separately into TCC mode.

If you have further questions about a specific laptop design and supported usage models, you should contact the manufacturer. NVIDIA doesn’t give advice on such configuration topics for every laptop.

The card needs to be in TCC mode to avoid the WDDM timeout. Even a GeForce card that is not driving a display still has a WDDM driver stack built on it by Windows (after all, you could go into windows control panel and enable a display on that card at any time). This WDDM driver stack may enforce card responsiveness (i.e. the WDDM watchdog) even if the card is “not being used” by windows.

Yes, if you have two GPUs in a system, and one of them is in TCC mode, then the TCC mode GPU should not be affected by the WDDM timeout.

Thanks, I will try a TCC mode GPU

i am planning to buy new laptop , can you share me the models which support TCC? I am really looking forward for the answer as i couldn’t figure it out.