A free tool with a bit of a strange name will let you know what's using the GPU on your PC. Microsoft engineer Scott Hanselman created gputaskman to show more details than Windows 11's built-in tools.
Task Manager can show per-process GPU usage and memory consumption, but it provides limited insight into exactly how applications are using GPU resources. You can see more information in the Details tab, but that still fails to paint a full picture.
The gputaskman app shows information for individual processes, such as GPU usage and VRAM consumption. Rather than simply showing that GPU memory is in use, gputaskman can help pinpoint whether that memory is being consumed by an AI model, a web browser, desktop rendering, or another process.
It can also identify local AI workloads and display details about running LLMs, including information about model memory usage and related GPU resources. The app displays GPU temperature as well.
Hanselman explained the app's purpose on the gputaskman GitHub page:
"Task Manager says '15 GB used.' This tries to answer: by what? Model weights? KV cache? Your browser? The desktop compositor? And why is so much GPU memory in system RAM?"
The app is still in the early stages of development. Hanselman has invited people on X to create pull requests. Right now, gputaskman supports Windows PCs with AMD or NVIDIA GPUs. Hanselman said in a follow-up post that the goal is to work on the Surface Laptop Ultra and other RTX Spark and Windows on Arm devices.
Microsoft's recently announced Hybrid intelligence initiative combines on-device AI processing with cloud-based AI services. As more AI tasks run locally on PCs, users may want better visibility into how those workloads affect GPU memory and performance. Tools such as gputaskman provide a detailed look at which processes, models, and applications are consuming GPU resources.
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