Gaming on a Tesla GPU

[cmelak]

You can game on a Tesla GPU (when all other GPUs are out of stock  ) and you even don't need any driver modifications!

 

What do you need:

• Tesla GPU, I used Tesla M40 (similar to 980Ti) but any other at least Kepler card should work (but doesn't have to)
• iGPU or another dedicated GPU for display output, I tested Radeon RX460 and GeForce 730 on Asus Z270 motherboard
• Windows 10 (if you use dedicated GPU for display output you need Windows Insider build), I used build 21301 (latest Insider build)

Driver installation:

• Download and install latest CUDA Toolkit (11.2). It comes with driver that works with both GeForce and Tesla cards. During installation uncheck non-driver related stuff (CUDA group). If you have two Nvidia GPUs make sure that both use this driver.
• Switch card to WDDM mode - open Command Prompt as Administrator, navigate to "c:\Program Files\NVIDIA Corporation\NVSMI" and run "nvidia-smi -dm 0" or "nvidia-smi -i 1 -dm 0" if you have two Nvidia GPUs. Reboot the system. After reboot you should see your Tesla card present in Task Manager.

Game or app configuration:

• Go to Settings, Display and Graphics settings. Add and select your game or app. Click on Options button and select your Tesla GPU from "Specific GPU" dropdown (you need Windows Insider build) or if you are lucky Tesla GPU is listed as High performance GPU.

 

[tnast99]

Giving this a try right now. Couple things I noticed.

• Not all installations of the nvidia drivers will create the NVSMI folder containing nvidia-smi.exe in the nvidia folder under program files. Sometimes it will be buried in sys32. The best way to find nvidia-smi.exe is to do a search of your entire C drive for the program.
• If you run nvidia-smi without any of the arguments, you can see the ID's of each of the nvidia GPU's in the system. Use this to see what the ID is for the card(s) you want to enable WDDM mode on. I've attached a screenshot of the output so you can see what it reports.

After I do my reboot, I'll see if I can get the modified SLI drivers to work, and get these cards in SLI.

 

EDIT: I am running Build 21313.1000, and I do not have the dropdown to manually specify which GPU to use, only high performance and power saving (neither of which are the M40's). Looking into this right now.