Seeing GPU use for each app in Pulse by Zaweba

Graphics cards do far more than games these days. Browsers draw pages with them, video players decode with them, and plenty of apps quietly lean on them in the background. Pulse by Zaweba has a GPU column in its Live table so you can see which of your apps is using the graphics processor, as well as a GPU graph for the whole PC.

It needs no administrator rights. You open Pulse as a normal user and the figures are there.

Where the numbers come from

Windows keeps its own counters for the GPU's engines, and Pulse reads those. A graphics card has several engines (for 3D work, video decoding, copying and so on), and an app may use more than one. For each app Pulse shows the busiest engine that app is using, which is the figure that tells you how close it is to holding the card back.

That choice is worth understanding. If a video player is using a big share of the decode engine and very little of the 3D engine, its GPU figure reflects the decode work. It isn't an average that hides the busy part.

Some PCs don't offer GPU counters at all, usually because of the graphics driver or the hardware. On those, the total is left empty rather than shown as zero. An empty box means Pulse can't read this here, and a zero means nothing is using it. Keeping the two apart stops you thinking a busy card is idle.

Finding a GPU hog

Open the Live page (Ctrl+1 takes you there) and click the GPU column heading. Number columns sort biggest first on the first click, so the app working the card hardest goes to the top. Because all the processes of one program are gathered into one row, a browser with dozens of processes shows as a single line with one GPU figure, which is far easier to read than a long list of identical names.

If the top app is something you expected, such as a game or a video editor, that's fine. If it's something you closed an hour ago, or a program you don't recognise, select it and use Open file location to see where it lives, or End task if you know you want it gone.

Using it alongside the other readings

GPU use on its own doesn't tell the whole story. A card that is busy for a long time gets warm, and the Temperatures page shows GPU core, hot spot and memory temperatures when the hardware offers them, without administrator rights. It's useful to have both open when a game starts to stutter: if GPU use is high and the hot spot is in its warm or hot band, you know where to look.

The GPU graph at the top of the Live page is scaled 0 to 100 per cent, so it's easy to compare with CPU. When the GPU is near the top and CPU is low, the card is the limit. When it's the other way round, the processor is.

Mistakes to avoid

Don't read a short spike as a problem. Opening a window, scrolling a long page or starting a video can all jump GPU use briefly. Sort the column and watch for a few seconds before deciding.

Don't assume an empty total is a fault in your card. It just means Windows isn't offering the counters on that machine, and the rest of Pulse still works.

And don't forget the History page if the question is about earlier. The live column only shows what's happening now. For a fan that roared while you were out of the room, the temperature peaks list in History, with the three busiest apps at the time, is the better place to start.