GPU Requirements

To accelerate processing by using a GPU, your system must have a NVIDIA graphics card that supports CUDA compute capability version 7.5, 8.0, 8.6, 9.0, 10.0, or 12.0.

All Quadro and Tesla series cards that meet this requirement are supported. GeForce GTX series cards that meet this requirement are supported, but only with headless Linux operating systems. Tegra series cards are not supported, but you can request support by contacting OpenText. Media Server has been tested with NVIDIA Data Center L40 graphics cards.

The number of concurrent tasks that you can run on the GPU is constrained by the resources (such as the amount of memory) available on the graphics card. To achieve the best performance, the amount of memory in the machine must match or exceed the amount of RAM available on the GPU(s). For example, if you have two GPUs and each has 12 GB RAM, the machine must have at least 24 GB RAM to use the full performance of the GPUs.

If you are installing Media Server on a virtual machine, the virtual machine might need additional configuration to use the GPU successfully.

Install the NVIDIA CUDA Driver

To use GPU acceleration, you must install the NVIDIA CUDA driver, version 580 or later. For more information about the required driver version, refer to the CUDA toolkit release notes.

OpenText recommends installing the driver independently (without the CUDA toolkit) because this is easier and faster, and only installs the required components.

To install the NVIDIA CUDA driver on Windows

  • Download the driver from NVIDIA. After downloading the driver, run the installation program as an administrator, and follow the on-screen instructions.

To install the NVIDIA CUDA driver on Ubuntu

  1. Follow the steps in the NVIDIA documentation to install the driver.
  2. Verify that the driver installation was successful by running the nvidia-smi command.

Configure the GPU (Windows only)

Perform this step only if you are running Media Server on Windows. This step is not necessary on Linux.

To use a GPU to accelerate Media Server processing tasks, you must place the GPU in TCC mode. In this mode the graphics card is used for computation only and does not provide output for a display. Unless you use TCC mode, the GPU does not provide adequate performance and can be slower than using a CPU. Many GPUs are not in TCC mode by default, so you must place the card in TCC mode using the nvidia-smi tool.