SoftwareNov 7, 2026, 5:35 AM UTC·1 min read

gputaskman: Microsoft Engineer's Free Tool Shows What Uses Your GPU

Microsoft's Scott Hanselman has released gputaskman, a free GitHub tool that lists which processes consume your GPU and VRAM, much like Task Manager does for CPU and RAM.

A PC monitor showing a Task Manager-style list of processes with GPU and VRAM usage next to a graphics card. — Image: Hipertextual

Scott Hanselman, a vice president and member of the technical staff at Microsoft, has published gputaskman, a free GPU monitor on GitHub that finally shows which programs are using your graphics card.

Until now, most Windows performance tools have said little about the GPU beyond temperature and overall load. Users could see which service was eating memory or processor time, but not what was draining the graphics card. gputaskman fills that gap with a per-process view similar to the Windows Task Manager list, showing running programs, the memory each one uses and total GPU utilization.

What it reports

The tool displays GPU and VRAM usage per process, along with power consumption, temperatures, clock speed, video encoding and decoding activity and even PCIe traffic. It also exposes detailed information about what each process requests, though that data is aimed mostly at enthusiasts and developers.

One notable feature targets people who run AI models locally. gputaskman detects processes tied to language models and reports details such as weights, quantization levels and KV cache estimates. It can export results as plain text and JSON files, which is handy for sharing data or analyzing it later.

How it differs from Task Manager

Windows 11 tweaked Task Manager in August, but its GPU view still offers only general memory usage and customizable graphs for workloads such as 3D (games) or video. It does not break usage down by process, which is the main thing gputaskman adds.

The project is in early development, so users may run into bugs. Hanselman has not said whether he plans to bring it natively into an official Windows 11 update. It can be downloaded for free from the GitHub repository and works with NVIDIA and AMD GPUs, as well as Linux and Macs with Apple Silicon.

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Tags:gputaskmanmicrosoftscott hanselmangpuwindows 11github