Does My GPU Have CUDA?

After installing the necessary runtimes/drivers, running the command nvidia-smi from the terminal lists CUDA-capable graphics cards in the system. If your graphics card appears on this list, there is a 99.9% chance it is ready to run CUDA programs. However, some batch files may have altered the CUDA_VISIBLE_DEVICES environmental variable to exclude your graphics card, or there could be driver bugs that affect compatibility.

Understanding CUDA Standards and Drivers

The CUDA standard is updated with each generation of GPU. The Turing architecture, for example, supports:

DirectX 12 Ultimate 12.1 OpenGL 4.6 OpenCL 1.2 Vulkan 1.2.131 CUDA 7.5 Shader Model 6.5

Older cards support lower levels of API standards, but the newest standards often add esoteric and special case functions like ray tracing, which are usually ignored by hardware that doesn't support them.

Introduction to CUDA

CUDA is a parallel computing platform and an application programming interface (API) model created by Nvidia. It is also known by the term Unified Shader Units. Currently, every Nvidia card supports CUDA, from older cards like the GF 8xxx to the latest models.

If you have an Nvidia GPU, it is equipped with CUDA cores. This has been the case since the release of the GF 8xxx series. I personally still have my GTX 970, which has utilized CUDA cores for video encoding tasks, significantly speeding up the encoding process.

Compatibility with AMD GPUs

If your video card is from Nvidia, the answer is almost certain, as it almost certainly supports CUDA. However, if your card is from AMD, the other major producer of graphics cards, the answer is no. AMD-based cards do not support CUDA, with a few exceptions for specific models.

For more information, visit the CUDA - Wikipedia page.