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I have a machine with an NVIDA GTX 1050 Ti GPU (compute capability 6.1), and am trying to profile a kernel in a program I built with CUDA 11.4. My OS distribution is Devuan GNU/Linux 4 Chimaera (~= Debian 11 Bullseye).

NSight Compute starts my program, and shows me API call after API call, but when I get to the first kernel launch, it gives me an error message in the Details column of the API call listing:

Error: Profiling is not supported on this device

Why? What's wrong with my device? Is it a permissions issue?

einpoklum
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1 Answers1

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tl;dr: Nsight Compute no longer supports Pascal GPUs.

Nsight Compute used to support Pascal-microarchitecture GPUs (Compute Capability 6.x) - up until version 2019.5.1. Beginning with 2020, Nsight Compute dropped support for Pascal.

If you're wondering why that is - no reason or justification was given to my knowledge (see also the quote below). This is especially puzzling, or annoying, given the short period of time between the release of post-Pascal GPUs and this dropping of support (as little as 1.5 years if you look at consumer GTX cards).

On the other hand, you may still use the NVIDIA Visual Profiler tool with Pascal cards, so they didn't throw you entirely under the bus. And you can also download and use Nsight Compute 2019.5.1.

To quote an NVIDIA moderator's statement on the matter on the NVIDIA developer forums:

Pascal support was deprecated, then dropped from Nsight Compute after Nsight Compute 2019.5.1. The profiling tools that support Pascal in the CUDA Toolkit 11.1 and later are nvprof and visual profiler.

einpoklum
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    One can still use a standalone installation of Nsight Compute 2019.5.1 for Pascal with CUDA >= 11.1 – Abator Abetor Oct 17 '21 at 05:56
  • The middle paragraph reads more like a rant than anything relevant to an actual answer to the question and adds nothing to the answer. I doubt anyone is interested in your speculation. You could easily answer this without all the editorialisation – talonmies Oct 17 '21 at 06:00
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    @talonmies: Well, it's true that the speculation is a rant, but a "why" is relevant to the question. – einpoklum Oct 17 '21 at 06:36
  • Any idea if there is a version available that supports profiling on a Tesla K80 (CC3.5) card? – Silicomancer Feb 14 '22 at 19:22
  • The old nvprof and nvvp visual profiler support Tesla K80's. But - really, get a new card. – einpoklum Feb 14 '22 at 20:41