Close games and other programs
Which programs stop Salad from using your GPU, and what to do when you need them.
Salad needs your whole graphics card (GPU), plus the CPU and RAM a job asks for. When another program is using the GPU, Salad may automatically pause Chopping until it is closed. Programs that count as using the GPU include, though may not be limited to:
- Video games.
- Local AI tools such as Ollama, LM Studio, and Stable Diffusion web UIs. These hold the GPU even when they look idle.
- Overlays and monitoring tools such as game overlays, FPS counters, and some hardware monitors.
- Applications with GPU acceleration
- Video editing and rendering software (Adobe Premiere Pro, DaVinci Resolve).
- 3D modelling software (Blender, Autodesk Maya).
- High-resolution video playback (4K or 8K).
- Streaming software (OBS Studio, Streamlabs).
- Virtual machines and emulators (VMware, VirtualBox, Android emulators).
- Benchmarking tools (3DMark, Unigine Heaven).
- Any other GPU compute software, including other mining or compute-sharing apps.
Close these before you start Chopping. If you need one of them while Salad is running, pause Salad first by choosing Pause Until Idle or Pause Indefinitely in the app (see Salad's running states); this stops the job cleanly and frees your hardware. Resume when you are done, or let auto start resume Salad the next time you go idle.
Chopping while you are using your machine degrades the network's performance and may ultimately result in fewer workloads, for you or the entire network.
If Salad keeps reporting that your GPU is in use when you have nothing open, see GPU temporarily disabled.
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