AMD radeon 6000 series (big navi)

Paul
Paul
Joined: 3 May 07
Posts: 123
Credit: 1785970663
RAC: 229880

Oh no.  It's crunching, but

Oh no.  It's crunching, but all WUs are getting marked as errors!

Paul
Paul
Joined: 3 May 07
Posts: 123
Credit: 1785970663
RAC: 229880

Hmm, okay, wait.  I'm getting

Hmm, okay, wait.  I'm getting confused.  It seemed to be working before, when I first installed it, but later, there were a lot of compute errors and some tasks were stuck at 100%.  I rebooted and fiddled with the opencl pkgs a bit.  How things seem to be working and I've verified that tasks are completing without error.  Confusing.  Could be random, could be something serious.

archae86
archae86
Joined: 6 Dec 05
Posts: 3157
Credit: 7230098178
RAC: 1157083

Paul wrote:So, at least I can

Paul wrote:
So, at least I can benefit from your experience:  What ended up being the optimal number of concurrent WUs on the 6800 XT?

I suppose you are talking about Einstein Gamma-Ray Pulsar GPU work.  Still, I suspect the answer will depend a bit on your CPU and perhaps on other system characteristics.

I operate a 6800 on a host with a quad-core i5-4690K CPU and settled on 3X, and a 6800Xt on a hex-core i5-9400F CPU and settled on 4X.

I've not rechecked those in a long time, so your mileage will vary.  Best to run your own tests.

By the way, don't compare yourself to me on RAC or completion times.  I'm trying to save power and lessen my heating of the rooms at hot hours of the day, so I have multi-hour exclusions, and substantial downclocking in force on both systems, currently.

 

Tom M
Tom M
Joined: 2 Feb 06
Posts: 6471
Credit: 9595835434
RAC: 6336762

6800xthttps://www.tomshardwar

6800xthttps://www.tomshardware.com/news/pick-up-an-amd-radeon-rx-6800-xt-for-just-dollar699-real-deals

A Proud member of the O.F.A.  (Old Farts Association).  Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.® (Garrison Keillor)  I want some more patience. RIGHT NOW!

Paul
Paul
Joined: 3 May 07
Posts: 123
Credit: 1785970663
RAC: 229880

Yeah, I saw that Sonnet card

Yeah, I saw that Sonnet card at B&H while monitoring instocknow.net, but I couldn't find any reviews; it's an odd product.  Anyway, prices are reasonable again.

My 6800XT is pretty great.  According to OpenCL benchmarks, the 6800XT should be about 3 times the 5700XT performance, but oh well, I'm pretty happy with 2X.  That's still more than I was expecting based on the top 50 E@H computers list.

Tom M
Tom M
Joined: 2 Feb 06
Posts: 6471
Credit: 9595835434
RAC: 6336762

Paul wrote: My 6800XT is

Paul wrote:

My 6800XT is pretty great.  According to OpenCL benchmarks, the 6800XT should be about 3 times the 5700XT performance, but oh well, I'm pretty happy with 2X.  That's still more than I was expecting based on the top 50 E@H computers list.

How many tasks are you running on the GPU?  2 or 3?

Tom M

A Proud member of the O.F.A.  (Old Farts Association).  Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.® (Garrison Keillor)  I want some more patience. RIGHT NOW!

Paul
Paul
Joined: 3 May 07
Posts: 123
Credit: 1785970663
RAC: 229880

I'm doing 2, now.  I checked,

I'm doing 2, now.  I checked, and that was better than 1, based on just the first day of work.  I was going to run 2 for a week and then try 3 concurrent tasks.

171 s/task for 1 GPU task

280 s/task for 2 GPU concurrent tasks

For reference, my 5700XT did 277 s/task, sequential.  Hmm, I suppose I could try 3x now.  It's a little inconsistent at 2x; I see some tasks completing in 250 s, but that's unusual.  They could just be randomly easy WUs?  I probably will bump it up to 3x soon.

Tom M
Tom M
Joined: 2 Feb 06
Posts: 6471
Credit: 9595835434
RAC: 6336762

Paul wrote: I'm doing 2,

Paul wrote:

I'm doing 2, now.  I checked, and that was better than 1, based on just the first day of work.  I was going to run 2 for a week and then try 3 concurrent tasks.

171 s/task for 1 GPU task

280 s/task for 2 GPU concurrent tasks

For reference, my 5700XT did 277 s/task, sequential.  Hmm, I suppose I could try 3x now.  It's a little inconsistent at 2x; I see some tasks completing in 250 s, but that's unusual.  They could just be randomly easy WUs?  I probably will bump it up to 3x soon.

Give 2 a day so you have a good baseline.  Then try 3. I have ended up at 2 (I think) when I last had some Rx 5700's.

When NVIDIA and Radeon drivers don't play well together for BOINC, I had to pick one or the other and get rid of the temptation to try to run both under BOINC.

If 3 takes less than 420 seconds you have an aboslute gain.

I think, however, it is more likely that 3 will take less than 513 seconds.

Tom M

 

A Proud member of the O.F.A.  (Old Farts Association).  Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.® (Garrison Keillor)  I want some more patience. RIGHT NOW!

Peter van Kalleveen
Peter van Kalleveen
Joined: 15 Jan 19
Posts: 45
Credit: 250329645
RAC: 0

Tom M wrote: When NVIDIA and

Tom M wrote:

When NVIDIA and Radeon drivers don't play well together for BOINC, I had to pick one or the other and get rid of the temptation to try to run both under BOINC.

I run with a dual AMD/NVIDIA setup most of the time, the biggest issue i have found is that both brands during the installation write over the same OpenCL file that causes issues with the othjer.

There is a permanent way to correctly fix this if you google enough, but the easy way is to first install nvidia drivers, and then AMD drivers. 

Then AMD uses its own openCL and nvidia uses cuda anyway.

For me installing it this way solved all problems.

Paul
Paul
Joined: 3 May 07
Posts: 123
Credit: 1785970663
RAC: 229880

Okay, so I have some updates,

Okay, so I have some updates, if anyone is still interested.  I have run the stats on my 6800XT at 3x concurrent tasks several times, each time with a different sample of recent set of pending tasks, and the results are good, but inconsistent.  The latest results are the best, but also have the most variance.

6800XT @ 3x: (130 +/- 14) s/task, were I'm using the mean with 1 STDEV as the uncertainty estimate.

This is much different than 1x or 2x, for which the results were pretty consistent, maybe +/- 10 s/task at most.  So, either 3x is crossing some threshold or it's because I have been using the card to play some games.  Probably the latter.  In any case, it is less than 140 s/task from the 2x test, so I'm happy here.  I think I'll wait to try 4x, but I do want to do that, eventually.

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