Latest drivers (NVidia and ATI)

[Jason G]

...
I am coming back up from 270.48 that I installed trying to find the desktop bug I am still seeing.

Is that the one where some firefox menus drew over the task bar ?

[arkayn]

This is one where the desktop forces itself into focus every 30 minutes, annoying when you are just surfing but infuriating when you are playing a full screen game.

[Jason G]

LoL, Ok that would be annoying.  No I never had that one & am not sure how a display driver would change focus.

[Edit:] for some reason it reminds me of the old Microsoft Word Paperclip Guy 

[arkayn]

If worse come to it, I will put the GTX560 in the Q8200 machine and put the HD5830 in the AMD Quad core machine and go from there.

[Richard Haselgrove]

After a couple of days running NVidia 280.26 on the 420M (update from 275.33), I'm seeing a consistent improvement on Einstein tasks - saving ~500 seconds on ~7,000 second tasks. CPU time has also come down, but by a smaller proportion. Einstein is probably not such an intensive app as the ones we make here, but the uniform runtime makes it easier to compare.

[benool]

Any word on memory usage for the folks with 256Mb cards?

260.xx leaves about 240Mb for processing, 270 series was bringing that down to unsable levels. How about 280?

[Jason G]

How about 280?

  considerably better I'm told

[Mike]

ATI CAL 11.8 is out.

http://sites.amd.com/us/game/downloads/Pages/radeon_vista-64.aspx

[arkayn]

I might end up loading that one once I finish rebuilding my AMD machine, I think I will end up with a mixed GPU environment for testing purposes.

Primary will be my ATI HD5830 and the GTX560 will go in the second slot.

[Claggy]

I might end up loading that one once I finish rebuilding my AMD machine, I think I will end up with a mixed GPU environment for testing purposes.

Primary will be my ATI HD5830 and the GTX560 will go in the second slot.

When i tested the preview version of Cat 11.8, OpenCL apps consumed lots of CPU time, just like Cat 11.7, and the Nvidia 27x.xx and later drivers,

Claggy

[arkayn]

I will be primarily running Collatz on the 5830 so that would not really affect me there.

I might even go back to an earlier build since I have an older card.

[efmer (fred)]

Installed 280.26 on two of my Win 7 64 machines with GTX 295.

One produced a BSOD or hang ever couple of hours and produced Seti errors. Back to 280.26 no problems yet.

Other one produced  no errors but only about 16 second runtime before it finished (Seti enhanced), with an extremely high CPU load of 100%, more than normal.
I already noticed the RAC going down on that machine.....
Did a restart, that didn't solve a thing.
Back to 208.26 and it works just fine.
Using the latest Lunatics installer.

[Richard Haselgrove]

Fred, you're getting me really confused here.

Installed 280.26 on two of my Win 7 64 machines with GTX 295.

One produced a BSOD or hang ever couple of hours and produced Seti errors. Back to 280.26 no problems yet.

Other one produced  no errors but only about 16 second runtime before it finished (Seti enhanced), with an extremely high CPU load of 100%, more than normal.
I already noticed the RAC going down on that machine.....
Did a restart, that didn't solve a thing.
Back to 208.26 and it works just fine.
Using the latest Lunatics installer.

You installed 280.26, you had problems, you went back to 280.26, and then you went back to 280.26 again and now it's OK?

Other one produced  no errors but only about 16 second runtime before it finished (Seti enhanced), with an extremely high CPU load of 100%, more than normal.

That sounds typical for a -9 overflow. There are a lot about.

I already noticed the RAC going down on that machine.....

Don't rely on RAC, it reacts far too slowly, and often in the opposite direction.

When work supply is bad, my RAC goes up, because my wingmates crunch the pending work I'm waiting for.
When work supply is good, my RAC goes down, because the buggers stuff it away in a cache instead, so my pendings go up.

[Ghost0210]

When i tested the preview version of Cat 11.8, OpenCL apps consumed lots of CPU time, just like Cat 11.7, and the Nvidia 27x.xx and later drivers,

Claggy

And as far as I can tell they haven't fixed the issue in the release version either

[benool]

How about 280?

  considerably better I'm told

installed the latest Nvidia driver and I can confirm the memory mamangement was improvement compared to 277.

With 280.26 installed, I get this in Boinc :
19/08/2011 19:41:13      NVIDIA GPU 0: GeForce 8600 GTS (driver version unknown, CUDA version 4000, compute capability 1.1, 240MB, 96 GFLOPS peak)

so just like before.
Let's see in a few hours how it performs.