GPU Acceleration
VoicePad uses your NVIDIA GPU to run Whisper transcription significantly faster than CPU. On an RTX 3050 (4 GB VRAM), the turbo model transcribes a 60-second recording in under 3 seconds.
NVIDIA GPUs only
GPU acceleration has been tested exclusively with NVIDIA GPUs. AMD and Apple Silicon GPUs are not supported.
What You Need
- An NVIDIA GPU (GeForce, Quadro, or Tesla)
- An up-to-date NVIDIA driver (version 520 or newer)
CUDA runtime libraries are bundled with VoicePad automatically. You do not need to install the CUDA toolkit, cuDNN, or any NVIDIA developer tools.
Recommended Models by GPU
| GPU | VRAM | Recommended Model |
|---|---|---|
| RTX 3050, RTX 4060 | 4 GB | turbo |
| RTX 3060, RTX 4070 | 6-8 GB | turbo or large-v3 |
| RTX 3080, RTX 4090 | 10+ GB | large-v3 |
Verifying GPU Is Active
When VoicePad starts, the header bar shows the active device:
model: turbo device: cuda
If it shows device: cpu, VoicePad did not detect a usable NVIDIA GPU and fell back to CPU automatically.
Performance
Measured on RTX 3050 (4 GB VRAM), turbo model:
| Audio Duration | Transcription Time |
|---|---|
| 10 seconds | ~0.5 s |
| 60 seconds | ~2-3 s |
| 5 minutes | ~10-15 s |
GPU acceleration provides roughly 4-10x speedup over CPU.
Troubleshooting
VoicePad shows device: cpu but I have an NVIDIA GPU
- Check your NVIDIA driver version by running
nvidia-smiin a terminal - Make sure the driver is version 520 or newer
- Reinstall VoicePad:
uv tool install voicepad --reinstall
Out of memory error
Switch to a smaller model from the Settings tab. Try small or distil-small.en if your GPU has limited VRAM.