Seti@Home optimized science apps and information
Optimized Seti@Home apps => Windows => GPU crunching => Topic started by: Purple Rabbit on 02 Jan 2010, 04:26:02 pm
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I don't have a problem, but I am curious. Santa gave me (OK, I specified what I wanted) a new GTX 260 board to replace my 8600GTS in my Q6600 Win Vista computer. The old GPU card took 20 seconds (CPU time) to initialize and then off it went. The GTX 260 takes 30 seconds (CPU time). I'm kind of assuming that there is more "stuff" to be sent to the more capable card before it does its thing. All tasks are successfully completing with the new GPU card so I'm quite happy with the 5x increase in speed.
I may have just answered my own stupid question, but inquiring minds want to know ;D I'm running what the 0.2 installer gave me for SETI (including CUDA).
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Check you grabbed the Cuda 2.3 DLLs & dropped them over the 2.2 ones the installer would have put in. Hovering the mouse over the dll files (cudart.dll & cufft.dll) in the project folder should show a tooltip containing the version number. An improved installer with these optional DLLs included is in the process of development ( taking time because of other issues.)
As an aside, another thing you *might* be seeing with a new card, and so new drivers, *could* be a result of having innocently updated/installed your display drivers to the latest 195 series whilst installing the new card. I don't know about others, but I see a performance drop (and more importantly stability) in Win7x64 with the latest drivers, and have now reverted to 191 series. That's with a 9600GSO.
It is possible the dirvers are doing 'more stuff' ... but exactly whatever that is, it hasn't justified either the compromised system stability or performance drop for me.
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Thanks Jason.
I loaded the CUDA 2.3 dlls eons ago for the old card after the 0.2 installer did its thing. Sorry I didn't mention it before...sigh.
I didn't load any new software for the new card. Potato, http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/show_host_detail.php?hostid=4367681 (I'm a wabbit!) seemed to still have what I needed. I assume nothing has gone South (or North for you :P ) since then. I have confirmed that I still have 191 series of drivers. Nothing seems to have changed except the new hardware
Like I said,this question is no big deal. Everything is working just fine, but why is it working this way? ;)
Rick
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Like I said,this question is no big deal. Everything is working just fine, but why is it working this way? ;)
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Mmmm, with those in the clear I don't really know, other than perhaps the higher compute capability of the new card ( 1.3 I presume). activates some extra Cuda preparation of other library functions/kernels. So then the answer might be yes, the startup could be sending larger/better kernels to the card I guess. There is some limited compute capability 1.3 specific code in there that I never played with...
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OK, I'll assume that the answer to my question remains a mystery of the universe, unknowable to all ;)
If I stay up at night wondering about this, it's your fault ;D
Rick
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You might consider "reinstalling" the 191.xx driver package. As nvidia went to a more universal installer of a larger size, it could be that refreshing and insuring that features of the "newer card" are properly being installed/utilized.
Regards
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Thanks Pappa,
I'll try that. I think everything is running like I thought, but a reset to known good values can't hurt.
The initial 10 second discrepancy on start up is almost inconsequential, but the engineer in me had to ask why.
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Thanks again to Pappa. Reinstalling the drivers (actually I put in the new 195.62) solved the "problem". Being just a Silly Wabbit I thought (dangerous!) that swapping one board for another where both used the same drivers would be a plug-and-play. Clearly it wasn't...sigh
Edit: This turned out to not be a wall clock time problem (they were about the same for multiple tasks), but a CPU efficiency problem. The CPU was being used (so it says) much more than needed. This is now (I think) been remedied with the reinstall of the drivers.
Rick
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Things that happen at the OS level (users never see) tend to confuse things. More than once I have been forced to swap hardware (due to hardware failure) and on restart seen various problems even though it is the "Same Type of Device." History has taught me that when playing with hardware changes "Boot into the Safe Mode," and then resintall drivers. Reboot and things are normally happy, the OS sees the hardware and then automajakly knows where the drivers are .
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See you've gone with the 195.62 drivers. I've just taken them off my 2 rigs, and gone back to version 191.07. The 195's were unstable on my Win7-64HP rig, but seemed ok on the Vista-32HP rig.
Kept failing with 'Nvidia driver has stopped responding but successfully recovered' message. Every time it failed, it would forget the WU it was working on, and start a new one. I had about 60 part finished tasks, even though there is a GTX260 and an 8800GTX in there. When it failed 3 times in an hour earlier, I'd had enough.
Went back to the older version, no fails, and it is now reducing the 'part-finished' WU's by completing them.
regards, Gizbar.