NVIDIA drivers for your Amazon EC2 instance
An instance with an attached NVIDIA GPU, such as a P- or G- series instance types, must have the appropriate NVIDIA driver installed. Depending on the instance type, you can either download a public NVIDIA driver, download a driver from Amazon S3 that is available only to AWS customers, or use an AWS AMI with the driver pre-installed.
To install AMD drivers on an instance with an attached AMD GPU, such as a G4ad instance, see AMD drivers instead.
Topics
Types of NVIDIA drivers
The following are the main types of NVIDIA drivers that can be used with GPU-based instances.
- Tesla drivers
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These drivers are intended primarily for compute workloads, which use GPUs for computational tasks such as parallelized floating-point calculations for machine learning and fast Fourier transforms for high performance computing applications.
- GRID drivers
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These drivers are certified to provide optimal performance for professional visualization applications that render content such as 3D models or high-resolution videos. You can configure GRID drivers to support two modes. Quadro Virtual Workstations provide access to four 4K displays per GPU. GRID vApps provide RDSH App hosting capabilities.
- Gaming drivers
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These drivers contain optimizations for gaming and are updated frequently to provide performance enhancements. They support a single 4K display per GPU.
Configured mode
On Windows, the Tesla drivers are configured to run in Tesla Compute Cluster (TCC) mode. The GRID and gaming drivers are configured to run in Windows Display Driver Model (WDDM) mode. In TCC mode, the card is dedicated to compute workloads. In WDDM mode, the card supports both compute and graphics workloads.
NVIDIA control panel
The NVIDIA control panel is supported with GRID and Gaming drivers. It is not supported with Tesla drivers.
Supported APIs for Tesla, GRID, and gaming drivers
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OpenCL, OpenGL, and Vulkan
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NVIDIA CUDA and related libraries (for example, cuDNN, TensorRT, nvJPEG, and cuBLAS)
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NVENC for video encoding and NVDEC for video decoding
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Windows-only APIs: DirectX, Direct2D, DirectX Video Acceleration, DirectX Raytracing
Available drivers by instance type
The following table summarizes the supported NVIDIA drivers for each GPU instance type.
| Instance type | Tesla driver | GRID driver | Gaming driver |
|---|---|---|---|
| G3 | Yes | Yes | No |
| G4dn | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| G5 | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| G5g | Yes ¹ | No | No |
| G6 | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| G6e | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| G6f | No | Yes | No |
| Gr6 | Yes | Yes | No |
| Gr6f | No | Yes | No |
| P2 | Yes | No | No |
| P3 | Yes | No | No |
| P4d | Yes | No | No |
| P4de | Yes | No | No |
| P5 | Yes | No | No |
| P5e | Yes | No | No |
| P5en | Yes | No | No |
| P6-B200 | Yes | No | No |
| P6e-GB200 | Yes | No | No |
¹ This Tesla driver also supports optimized graphics applications specific to the ARM64 platform
Installation options
Use one of the following options to get the NVIDIA drivers required for your GPU instance.
Options
