Windows Driver Mode

Microsoft and NVIDIA offer two driver modes for Windows.

• WDDM: On workstations and laptops, this is usually the default mode. This driver mode allows shared usage of the NVIDIA GPU for display output and GPGPU computing.
• TCC: This driver mode uses the NVIDIA GPU for GPGPU computing exclusively. It is only available on NVIDIA Tesla, NVIDIA Quadro or NVIDIA GTX Titan GPUs and is typically the default on most recent NVIDIA Tesla GPUs. As the GPU is not available for display output in this mode, the machine requires to be either headless or have a second (typically onboard GPU) available for display purposes.

To switch between WDDM and TCC driver modes, type the following command in a PowerShell or CMD window with administrator privileges:

nvidia-smi -g {GPU_ID} -dm {0|1} 

Here, GPU_ID is usually 0 for systems with a single GPU and may be identified by running nvidia-smi without any arguments. Pass 0 to -dm option for WDDM mode and 1 for TCC mode. For example, to change to TCC mode in a single GPU system use the following command:

nvidia-smi -g 0 -dm 1