Your GPU is temporarily disabled
Why Salad shows "Your GPU is temporarily disabled" or a temporary workload block when a game or another intensive program is detected, and how to get the GPU back.
What it means: Salad is meant to Chop while you're away from the PC. Customers pay for your whole graphics card, so when Salad detects a game or another intensive program using it, it pauses GPU workloads rather than let the job run badly. You see a notification first, then a temporarily disabled badge over your GPU on the Performance tab.
What triggers it: Anything that may be system-intensive:
- Games, including some launchers' background "pre-caching".
- Local AI tools (Ollama, LM Studio, Stable Diffusion UIs) and mining software outside Salad.
- Photo, video and 3D software (Adobe apps, DaVinci Resolve, Blender) and GPU-accelerated encoders such as OBS.
- Virtual Machine Software (VMWare, Virtualbox).
- Hardware-accelerated video playback at high resolution, and some overlays, wallpaper engines and monitoring tools.
What happens next
When the notification appears you have about a minute to close the program. If it keeps running, Salad disables GPU workloads for the rest of that Chopping session or until the program is closed; CPU and bandwidth workloads carry on. The block is temporary: it ends when you stop Chopping or when the program ends.
How to get the GPU back
Close the program
Quit it fully - tray icon > Exit - not just the window. Local AI tools in particular keep the model loaded in the background; you can also close the program using Task Manager.
Stop and restart Chopping
Salad should resume Chopping automatically - in the event it does not, follow these steps. In the Salad app, choose Stop (or pause), wait a few seconds, then Chop Now. The badge clears and Salad runs its compatibility check again before the next job.
Blocked while you were away?
Salad recognizes many GPU-heavy programs, some of which may run by services at programmed times. If you cannot find which program is causing Salad to be disabled, contact Salad Support so we can review the detection.
What about my privacy?
The detection run by Salad is done on your machine only - locally - Salad does not know your entire process list and only gets an event when a specific intensive process matching our detection criteria is detected.
Why not just share the GPU?
Jobs need the whole card. Pausing quickly means the customer's job moves to a free machine instead of running slowly on yours, which keeps the network healthy and customers around for longer.
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