mode is a driver model developed by NVIDIA specifically for their professional line of GPUs (historically the Tesla and Quadro series, and now select RTX cards).
nvidia-smi -i 0 -dm 1
: Required for Windows 11, introducing features like Shader Model 6.7. tcc wddm
Here is the breakdown of why this matters and how to choose. mode is a driver model developed by NVIDIA
Instead of going through the Windows GPU scheduler, TCC allows CUDA kernels to communicate directly with the GPU hardware. This eliminates the overhead of WDDM’s command buffer queuing and context switching. Instead of going through the Windows GPU scheduler,
: It is responsible for rendering the Windows desktop, managing display multitasking, and ensuring high-quality 2D and 3D graphics.
WDDM allows the GPU to borrow system RAM when its dedicated VRAM is exhausted. While useful for office workloads, this can introduce latency and bandwidth bottlenecks for compute-heavy tasks.