Latest drivers (NVidia and ATI)

[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???

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. 

Thanks. I knew that 470/480 were "older" design then 460, however I (wrongly) assumed that 570/580 would be at least same or newer design then 460...

[Jason G]

Thanks. I knew that 470/480 were "older" design then 460, however I (wrongly) assumed that 570/580 would be at least same or newer design then 460...

It's only *slightly* more complicated  by things, in that the original full Fermi design is for supercompute, whereas the 460 strips some stuff out & adds other bits to make games go faster.  The 570/580 is a 'newer' design, but has the full original Fermi layout, with the 460's memory controller & power enhancements, none of which relate to the compute geometry being optimised for games.

[msattler]

Notice 'slighlty' more power consumption on my top two rigs after the update........
Maybe a couple percent.....

But, that equates to more crunching.

Thanks again, Jason.

[SciManStev]

For Win 7 64, the new driver is working smoothly. Like Mark said, there is a slight increase in power usage. I migrated up from 260.99. I have no ill side effects.

Steve

[msattler]

For Win 7 64, the new driver is working smoothly. Like Mark said, there is a slight increase in power usage. I migrated up from 260.99. I have no ill side effects.

Steve

Thanks Steve....
Good to know that your results were the same as mine.

[Win95GUI]

Mine show up as CUDA 3.0

[Claggy]

Catalyst 11.1 is out,

Claggy

[aaronhaviland]

Latest beta NV drivers on Linux (270.18) seem to hint at a new version of CUDA around the corner. Wonder what this version might target?

(Unfortunately, this makes the cuda profiler fail for me, as the new drivers output an extra column: gridZ.)

Code: [Select]

orion@anubis:~$ strings /usr/lib/nvidia-current/libcuda.so|grep "CUDA "
OpenCL 1.0 CUDA 4.0.1


[Claggy]

Cat 11.3 was released yesterday, and 270.51 BETA has been released today,

Claggy

[Raistmer]

(Unfortunately, this makes the cuda profiler fail for me, as the new drivers output an extra column: gridZ.)

Aha, great! 2D grid limitation was very annoying. OpenCL has 3D for both local and global thread blocks. This made OpenCL->CUDa port quite cumbersome...

[TouchuvGrey]

3/30/2011 7:43:55 PM      NVIDIA GPU 0: GeForce GTX 460 (driver version 27051, CUDA version 4000, compute capability 2.1, 739MB, 684 GFLOPS peak)

[Claggy]

31/03/2011 01:30:46      NVIDIA GPU 0: GeForce GTX 460 (driver version 27051, CUDA version 4000, compute capability 2.1, 993MB, 717 GFLOPS peak)
31/03/2011 01:30:46      ATI GPU 0: ATI Radeon HD5700 series (Juniper) (CAL version 1.4.1332, 1024MB, 1360 GFLOPS peak)

Claggy

[arkayn]

Reminds self to always do a clean install with the Nvidia drivers as XP looks ugly when drivers are not properly installed.

[Claggy]

AMD APP SDK_2.4 was released 3 days ago,

What’s New in AMD APP SDK V2.4

Improved OpenCL runtime performance:
Zero copy transfer of data between CPU and GPU for APUs (Windows only)
Improved PCIe transfer speed
Improved kernel launch times
Support for AMD A-series devices
Support for:
AMD C-30 Accelerated Processor with AMD Radeon™ HD 6250 graphics card
AMD C-50 Accelerated Processor with AMD Radeon™ HD 6250 graphics card
AMD E-240 Accelerated Processor with AMD Radeon™ HD 6310 graphics card
AMD E-350 Accelerated Processor with AMD Radeon™ HD 6310 graphics card
AMD Radeon™ HD 6670 graphics card
AMD Radeon™ HD 6570 graphics card
AMD Radeon™ HD 6450 graphics card
Support for CPU/x86 images (Enables the support for image formats, as described in the Khronos OpenCL Specification, to be run on the x86 CPU)
Support for cl_khr_fp64 on the CPU.
Cached reads (-fno-alias)
Binary image format improvements
DXVA buffer sharing
FFT performance improvements
Uninstallation of SDK 2.4 or its components is now done through the Catalyst Install Manager (CIM). See the Installation Notes for a description of the procedure.
For the AMD APP Profiler v2.2:
Support for OpenCL™ application summary
Support for profiling with AMD Radeon™ HD6900 series GPUs (requires AMD APP SDK v2.4 and AMD Catalyst 11.2 or newer)
Improved Session List Explorer
Improved user documentation (now also accessible online in Documentation)
For the AMD APP KernelAnalyzer v1.8:
Support for AMD Catalyst 11.1 – 11.3
Support for setting the OpenCL compiler build options
Improved analysis for AMD Radeon™ HD 6970 graphics cards
Support for displaying x86 assembly code
Commencing with Catalyst 11.3, the AMD Accelerated Parallel Processing (APP) OpenCL runtime is included in the GPU drivers. More frequent updates to the run-time may be obtained by updating the drivers.

Claggy

[Raistmer]

yes, in true AMD way as usual.... compatible driver 11.4 listed... but they offer only 11.3 from official page still