Select Specific GPU for Zivid Software

This article demonstrates how to specify a computational device for Zivid Software. This is relevant if you have multiple GPUs and want to use a specific one. This can be one integrated GPU and one or more dedicated GPUs.

Note

Make sure that the GPU requirements for Zivid are met. If you are trying to run Zivid SDK using CPU or AMD GPU, check how to opt in to run the SDK with an unsupported compute device.

Specifying GPU is done by updating the Zivid Config file. If the file already exists and it’s located in %LOCALAPPDATA%ZividAPI for Windows or "${XDG_CONFIG_HOME-$HOME/.config}"/Zivid/API for Ubuntu, skip ahead to editing the ComputeDevice parameters below.

If the file does not exist:

1. Download the Config.yml file.

   The config file contains the following information:

   __version__: 4
   Configuration:
       ComputeDevice:
           SelectionFilter: ""
           Type: GPU
           Vendor: Nvidia
   

2. Place the config file in the following directory:

   Windows

   mkdir %LOCALAPPDATA%\Zivid\API
   move %HOMEPATH%\Downloads\Config.yml %LOCALAPPDATA%\Zivid\API\
   

   Ubuntu

   mkdir --parents "${XDG_CONFIG_HOME-$HOME/.config}"/Zivid/API
   mv ~/Downloads/Config.yml "${XDG_CONFIG_HOME-$HOME/.config}"/Zivid/API/
   

   Caution

   Any existing Config file will be overwritten.

Caution

Zivid configuration files must use .yml file extension ( not .yaml).

1. The desired GPU (if it is known) is assigned by changing the config file ComputeDevice parameters:

2. If you have a single GPU per vendor (e.g. an integrated Intel GPU and a dedicated NVIDIA GPU), change Type to GPU and Vendor to NVIDIA or Intel, e.g.

   ComputeDevice:
       SelectionFilter: ""
       Type: GPU
       Vendor: Nvidia
   

3. If you have multiple GPUs of the same vendor (e.g. two Nvidia GPUs), SelectionFilter must specify which GPU to use. Find the exact device name first: with the OpenCL version of the SDK, run clinfo -l to list all compute devices; with the CUDA version, run nvidia-smi -L instead. Leave Type and Vendor as Any, and set SelectionFilter to any unique part of the device name, e.g. for an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060:

   ComputeDevice:
       SelectionFilter: "RTX 3060"
       Type: Any
       Vendor: Any
   

4. To verify the changes, re-launch Zivid Studio and go to Help → About Zivid Studio → System Info → Compute Device Info. The selected device can be seen under Device info.

   

Version History

SDK	Changes
2.11.0	AMD is no longer recommended. Official support has been removed in SDK, see Enable Unsupported Compute Device for Zivid Software. Removed instructions to run SDK on CPU only.