CUDA not available

[jimbhicks]

I have a rather old PC with an Nvidia Geforce 9600 GT graphics card that is supposed to support CUDA. The card has only 512 MB memory. I have updated to the current Nvidia drivers. I am running the August 3 version of PWP 8.0 on Windows 7. Is there any idea from your end why I am getting the CUDA not available message? Windows 7? Not enough memory?

[jsachs]

I can only guess, but the Windows drivers use a lot of GPU memory so it is possible there is not enough left over.

Unless you have 2GB or more, I would not expect a big performance improvement. For now, only a few transformations use it -- using a computer with more cores, however, will benefit nearly every operation.

[jimbhicks]

Mr. Sachs,

I looked around for a program to test whether CUDA was operating properly on my PC and found CUDA-Z on Sourceforge. I don't pretend to understand all of the program's output results but it does seem to indicate that CUDA is functional. The performance tab shows GPU computational speeds for single-precision float, 64-bit, 32-bit, and 24-bit integer arithmetic but double-precision float is not supported.

I know this is probably not high on your priority list now and to me it is mostly of academic interest but I am curious why PWP 8.0 is saying CUDA is not available. How does PWP determine this? Is there some memory requirement that I do no satisfy, for example?

[jsachs]

In File/Preferences do you have CUDA enabled?

[jimbhicks]

Yes, CUDA is enabled if available.

[jsachs]

Did you download the latest driver from the NVIDIA web site?

[jimbhicks]

Yes, I have updated my drivers from the Nvidia web site since I became aware of this CUDA "problem". And, as I indicated in the previous post, the test program CUDA-Z says Cuda is working.

I was unaware of the CUDA feature on my computer before PWP 8.0. To my knowledge, I don't have any other programs that take advantage of it. I do have Lightroom 5 but a quick scan of some Adobe online info just now seems to indicate that it does not support CUDA on my machine.

[jimbhicks]

jsachs,

I appreciate the time and effort you have devoted to this but, unless there is some problem you may suspect in PWP or some other motivation, I suggest that you not waste any more time on this and go on to more important things.

Thanks.