Q100040: How to assign your Nvidia GPU to Mari on a Windows system

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SUMMARY

This article explains how to assign your dedicated Nvidia GPU to Mari. This has to be done on systems with separated display and dedicated graphics cards, where most commonly this is a combination of Intel HD graphics and an Nvidia GPU.
If your PC is using Intel graphics, Mari will fail to start as Intel GPUs are unsupported. The workaround is to manually assign your Nvidia card to Mari.
 
If your setup does not have Intel Graphics and you are experiencing crashes during startup, please review our Mari Startup problems article for further troubleshooting.

MORE INFORMATION

Mari only supports AMD or Nvidia GPUs with certain minimum requirements (shown on our system requirements page).

Laptops that come with 2 GPUs will try to automatically assign the best GPU for the job when running a program, in this case, the wrong GPU was assigned (Intel). This can be fixed by modifying the Nvidia Control Panel and Windows Settings to assign the correct GPU to Mari, as follows:

    1. Open Control Panel > Nvidia Control Panel

    2. Navigate to Manage 3D settings

    3. You will see two tabs: Global Settings and Program Settings, switch to Program Settings
    4. Under 'Select a program to customize' select Mari 6.0v1, if Mari is not in the dropdown list, click Add to the right of the dropdown list
      1. Add should display an extensive list of programs. If Mari 6.0v1 is in that list, click Add selected program and continue with step 5), if it's not, then click Browse on the bottom right.
      2. You will have to add Mari6.0v1.exe manually. (default location: C:\Program Files\Mari6.0v1\Bundle\bin\Mari6.0v1.exe)

    5. Under Option 2, select High-Performance NVIDIA processor, as shown below:



    6. Click Apply and then close the Nvidia Control Panel

    7. Open Windows Settings > System > Display

    8. Scroll down to the bottom of the page and click Graphics Settings

    9. In the Choose an app to set preference dropdown menu, select Classic app

    10. Click Browse, then navigate to and select the Mari6.0v1.exe (default location: C:\Program Files\Mari6.0v1\Bundle\bin\Mari6.0v1.exe), then click Add

    11. Click the Mari6.0v1.exe listing and then click Options:

      GraphicsSettings.png

    12. In the Graphics specifications pop-up, your dedicated GPU should be listed as the High performance GPU. Select High performance and then click Save:

      SelectGPU.png

    13. Close Windows Settings and launch Mari

After applying the above settings Mari should now work as expected.

FURTHER HELP
If you have tried all of the steps detailed above but still have issues setting the Nvidia GPU, please open a Support ticket per the guidance here:  Q100090: Reporting a Mari issue

For more information on how to open a Support ticket, please refer to the Q100064: Using the Support Portal article.

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