What exactly does NVPROF Power Profile measure?

Question

I have used NVPROF to get the power profile of a Kepler Architecture NVIDIA GPUs. My question is what exactly are we seeing? If I understand correctly there is a 12V and 3.3V rail feeding the GPU and the GPU can draw power from the PCI Bus. Is the NVPROF power samples a sum of the three? Or something else?

Thanks,

Answer 1

It's the sum of all power consumed by the GPU from all of its power rails/sources.

It is intended to be a measurement comparable to what nvidia-smi would report, or comparable to what is available in NVML (upon which nvidia-smi is built.)

It should be comparable to this NVML API call.