Latest drivers (NVidia and ATI)

[TouchuvGrey]

i just downloaded and installed the beta 266.35 drivers.
Have also downloaded, but not installed the CUDA Toolkit
3.2 ( 64 bit ). Is their anything i need to do to insure that
3.2 gets installed properly ?

     i'm familiar with updating nVIDIA drivers but only
did 1 CUDA and have forgotten how i did it.

[Richard Haselgrove]

I've only ever downloaded and run the driver installer package. I usually turn off BOINC entirely while I'm doing it - disable autorun at startup - because there's often a reboot involved: once the reboot has completed and everything is running, I check the driver and CUDA versions in NVidia Control Panel, and if they match what I'm expecting, I reckon it's safe to fire up BOINC again. Never been let down yet.

The only conceivable thing you could need the toolkit for (apart from developing new apps, of course) would be to get hold of specific versions of the rt and fft DLLs. I did that a few times in the early days, but now that the DLLs are "strongly versioned" (all recent CUDA applications need to have exactly the DLL versions they were compiled for), there's no point in extracting any support files manually.

[TouchuvGrey]

  As is all too often the case i acted in haste and was less than
clear as a result.

     i downloaded the 3.2 toolkit because that was the first
reference i found to CUDA 3.2.  Developing apps and needing
specific versions of rt and fft dll's is beyond me.

    i am looking to get and install 3.2 CUDA on my machine as
it seems likely that with the newest drivers and my GTX 460 i
would see some significant performane increases.

      What is the best way to do this ?

[Claggy]

  As is all too often the case i acted in haste and was less than
clear as a result.

     i downloaded the 3.2 toolkit because that was the first
reference i found to CUDA 3.2.  Developing apps and needing
specific versions of rt and fft dll's is beyond me.

    i am looking to get and install 3.2 CUDA on my machine as
it seems likely that with the newest drivers and my GTX 460 i
would see some significant performane increases.

      What is the best way to do this ?

Just install a 260.xx or later driver,

Claggy

[TouchuvGrey]

Hello Claggy:

                    i downloaded and installed the 266.35 driver. it seems i messed up something though
as it seems that i still have a 3.0 CUDA version

1/15/2011 9:26:10 AM      NVIDIA GPU 0: GeForce GTX 460 (driver version 26635, CUDA version 3020, compute capability 2.1, 739MB, 684 GFLOPS peak)
1/15/2011 9:26:10 AM      NVIDIA GPU 1: GeForce GTS 250 (driver version 26635, CUDA version 3020, compute capability 1.1, 998MB, 470 GFLOPS peak)
1/15/2011 9:26:10 AM   SETI@home   Found app_info.xml; using anonymous platform
1/15/2011 9:26:11 AM   SETI@home   URL http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/; Computer ID 5738837; resource share 1000

[arkayn]

Hello Claggy:

                    i downloaded and installed the 266.35 driver. it seems i messed up something though
as it seems that i still have a 3.0 CUDA version

1/15/2011 9:26:10 AM      NVIDIA GPU 0: GeForce GTX 460 (driver version 26635, CUDA version 3020, compute capability 2.1, 739MB, 684 GFLOPS peak)
1/15/2011 9:26:10 AM      NVIDIA GPU 1: GeForce GTS 250 (driver version 26635, CUDA version 3020, compute capability 1.1, 998MB, 470 GFLOPS peak)
1/15/2011 9:26:10 AM   SETI@home   Found app_info.xml; using anonymous platform
1/15/2011 9:26:11 AM   SETI@home   URL http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/; Computer ID 5738837; resource share 1000

Nope, you do have 3.2, they just express it differently.

Fri Jan 14 19:18:52 2011 |  | NVIDIA GPU 0: GeForce GTX 460 (driver version 26063, CUDA version 3020, compute capability 2.1, 768MB, 717 GFLOPS peak)

[glennaxl]

New Nvidia WHQL driver is out. version 266.58

[arkayn]

I just tried to install the 266.35 driver and suffered a nice BSOD. Went back to 263.06 and back up.

[Richard Haselgrove]

I just tried to install the 266.35 driver and suffered a nice BSOD. Went back to 263.06 and back up.

I put it on four machines last night (one Windows 7, three XP, all 32 bit). No problems with any of them.

[arkayn]

I just tried to install the 266.35 driver and suffered a nice BSOD. Went back to 263.06 and back up.

I put it on four machines last night (one Windows 7, three XP, all 32 bit). No problems with any of them.

Mine was XP Pro-64.

[M_M]

266.58 WHQL drivers are out...

Btw, does anyone know how come that GTX460 is compute capability 2.1, and newer few month newer GTX570/GTX580 only compute capability 2.0? Is nVidia going backwards???

[msattler]

Any benefit noticed in anything beyond 260.63?

My rigs are thumping along nicely on 260.63 and 260.99, except of course the rigs with Win2K, which I think stopped being supported at 257.21.

[Jason G]

266.58 WHQL drivers are out...

Btw, does anyone know how come that GTX460 is compute capability 2.1, and newer few month newer GTX570/GTX580 only compute capability 2.0? Is nVidia going backwards???

Compute capability mainly differentiates 2 things, The instruction set & compute geometry.  Although they have the same instructions, 2.1 as used in the 460 is different to the cuda core configuration used in the 470/480/570/580 , which is 2.0.  Basically the 460 has extra warp schedulers & a few minor differences, while 2.0 covered the complete original Fermi design. 

[Jason G]

Any benefit noticed in anything beyond 260.63?

My rigs are thumping along nicely on 260.63 and 260.99, except of course the rigs with Win2K, which I think stopped being supported at 257.21.

  I noticed a small speed improvement somewhere around 263, but since then it has mostly been adding support for new cards.

[msattler]

Okee dokey.......

Off for another round of updates then.

Thanks, Jason.