Could not load dynamic library 'cudart64_101.dll' on tensorflow CPU-only installation

Tensorflow 2.1+

What's going on?

With the new Tensorflow 2.1 release, the default tensorflow pip package contains both CPU and GPU versions of TF. In previous TF versions, not finding the CUDA libraries would emit an error and raise an exception, while now the library dynamically searches for the correct CUDA version and, if it doesn't find it, emits the warning (The W in the beginning stands for warnings, errors have an E (or F for fatal errors) and falls back to CPU-only mode. In fact, this is also written in the log as an info message right after the warning (do note that if you have a higher minimum log level that the default, you might not see info messages). The full log is (emphasis mine):

2020-01-20 12:27:44.554767: W tensorflow/stream_executor/platform/default/dso_loader.cc:55] Could not load dynamic library 'cudart64_101.dll'; dlerror: cudart64_101.dll not found

2020-01-20 12:27:44.554964: I tensorflow/stream_executor/cuda/cudart_stub.cc:29] Ignore above cudart dlerror if you do not have a GPU set up on your machine.

Should I worry? How do I fix it?

If you don't have a CUDA-enabled GPU on your machine, or if you don't care about not having GPU acceleration, no need to worry. If, on the other hand, you installed tensorflow and wanted GPU acceleration, check your CUDA installation (TF 2.1 requires CUDA 10.1, not 10.2 or 10.0).

If you just want to get rid of the warning, you can adapt TF's logging level to suppress warnings, but that might be overkill, as it will silence all warnings.

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Tensorflow 1.X or 2.0:

Your CUDA setup is broken, ensure you have the correct version installed.

To install the prerequisites for GPU support in TensorFlow 2.1:

1. Install your latest GPU drivers.
2. Install CUDA 10.1.
   • If the CUDA installer reports "you are installing an older driver version", you may wish to choose a custom installation and deselect some components. Indeed, note that software bundled with CUDA including GeForce Experience, PhysX, a Display Driver, and Visual Studio integration are not required by TensorFlow.
   • Also note that TensorFlow requires a specific version of the CUDA Toolkit unless you build from source; for TensorFlow 2.1 and 2.2, this is currently version 10.1.
3. Install cuDNN.
   1. Download cuDNN v7.6.4 for CUDA 10.1. This will require you to sign up to the NVIDIA Developer Program.
   2. Unzip to a suitable location and add the bin directory to your PATH.
4. Install tensorflow by pip install tensorflow.
5. You may need to restart your PC.

TensorFlow 2.3.0 works fine with CUDA 11. But you have to install tf-nightly-gpu (after you installed tensorflow and CUDA 11): https://pypi.org/project/tf-nightly-gpu/

Try:

pip install tf-nightly-gpu

Afterwards you'll get the message in your console:

I tensorflow/stream_executor/platform/default/dso_loader.cc:48] Successfully opened dynamic library cudart64_110.dll