Microsoft VP Scott Hanselman has released gputaskman — a free, open-source GPU monitoring tool built for Windows 11, with cross-platform support for Linux (including WSL) and macOS on Apple Silicon. It’s not an official Microsoft product, but it is written and maintained by a senior Microsoft engineer who also works on GitHub’s engineering team.
The app is live now on GitHub, with portable binaries available for immediate download, no installation required. No price, no subscription, no telemetry: just a ZIP file and a README. It runs on Windows 11 Pro, Home, and Enterprise editions alike, and yes, it works with the version you already have installed.
No upgrade to Windows 11 required. No 'Windows 11 download' needed. Just run it. And it answers a question Task Manager still won’t: which process is eating your VRAM? Not just “GPU memory used: 14.2 GB”, but why, and by whom.
Is it your LLM loading 7B weights into VRAM? Your browser decoding AV1 in hardware? Your compositor caching desktop layers? Gputaskman breaks it down per process, per GPU engine, per memory pool, including system RAM allocations that show up as GPU memory in Windows’ misleading reporting.
It supports Nvidia and AMD GPUs on Windows. Nvidia only on Linux/WSL. And Apple Silicon’s unified memory architecture on macOS. There’s no Indian or US retail price because there’s no store listing, and no launch event, no press release, no marketing page.
It’s a GitHub repo, updated at 07:26 UTC on 6 November 2026, and it’s already being pulled into dev workflows across Reddit, Hacker News, and local AI labs. Next: Hanselman says he’s adding memory lifetime tracking and per-kernel GPU utilization in the next release, expected within weeks.
CDFiled by The Computing Desk
Laptops, desktops, processors, graphics cards and the operating systems that run on them.
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