Assets and drawbacks of new graphic driver AMD 14.9 beta for BRP5 crunching
29 Oct 2014 0:13:40 UTC
Topic 197771
(moderation:
Hallo!
I´m using a cpu i5-4430 and graphicscard amd HD7700 for crunching BRP5 taks on GPU. I suffered from lots of invalid BRP5 tasks, all with validate error (32:00100000), whatever this means. Further, sometimes I got a blank screen for a seconde or so resulting in a crashed Firefox browser and a erroed BRP5 task. Over a observation time of 21 days I crunched 202 taks from BRP5 and 19, shortly 10%, of them ended up invalid. That´s very, very much compared with other applications. Then I got the information about a new amd driver 14.9beta, promissing to avoid these brakeups. Indeed, since installation a week ago, I observed no brakeups and no invalid tasks, but
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Driver __ | crunched taks | avg. Run time [s] _| avg. CPU time [s]
14.4 ____|___ 45 ______ | 8932,72 +/-300,01 | 1956,50 +/-310,84
14.9beta |___ 70 ______ | 8693,25 +/-317,77 | 3979,26 +/-62,91
The difference in Run time of -239,47 +/-437,02 is irrelevant in view of the statistical error, but the CPU time for the new driver is about double as high as before. This is not relevant for my CPU as this doesn´t provide HyperThreading. For CPUs capable of HT the benefit from very little invalid tasks might overcome the disadvantage of higher CPU load. For the resulting lower GPU load I don´t have figures available. But this might predominate the higher CPU load for multiple GPU task crunching in regard of overall efficiency.
By the way, there is no correlation between Run Time and CPU time.
Kind regards and happy crunching
Martin
Assets and drawbacks of new graphic driver AMD 14.9 beta for BRP
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I have found that BRP4G and BRP5 are somewhat sensitive to the anti-virus that I use, and I would get an error every day or two; try excluding the BOINC program and data folders. However, that does not help in a lot of cases, since it does not necessarily preclude the real-time protection. So if you are using an AV, you may want to try another one. Windows Defender (spyware only) on Win7 works fine.
Hallo Jim 1348! Thankyou for
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Hallo Jim 1348!
Thankyou for your reply.
I´d crunch before BRP4G also etc. without any problems with my AV on. Furthermore this doesn´t explain, why there are no invalid or erroed taks of BRP5 since installation of the new driver. And AMD itself recommended to update the driver to the new vwersion 14.9beta, to avoid brakeups.
Kind regards an happy crunching
Martin
RE: Hallo Jim
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Yes, I'm new to this game. What does it mean 'brakeups'. I just installed 14.9.1beta based on your comment. Thanks
merle
What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist.
— Salman Rushdie
Hallo Merle! Wellcome on
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Hallo Merle!
Wellcome on board!
Breakeups does mean, that the driver stops working. In simple, but worse case you get suddenly a blank screen for a few seconds and than the graphics driver starts from the operating system controlled again. But, if you had a running browser, you have to restart this and a BOINC task running on GPU became damaged and discarded. A new GPU task become started automaticaly. In the other, 2. case, you get a blank screen and no other action than switching off the whole PC can bring it back to normal operation. In this case, there is no loss of crunching time and tasks, as the GPU task etc. are still crunching in the background.
The first case happened with driver 14.4. The 2. case does happen with the driver 14.9, dated 29.09.2014. Only the drivers 14.9.1 beta or 14.9.2 beta, dated 24.10.2014 are working well. Maybe the driver 14.9.2 beta is crunching a bit faster than 14.9.1 beta, but both are driving over all faster than driver 14.4, beside of the higher CPU and lower GPU load for the new issues.
I hope, this became understandable, otherwise do not hasitate to ask here again.
Kind regards an happy crunching
Martin
RE: Hallo Merle! Wellcome
)
Thanks for your reply,
Nein, es war alles ganz klar. Danke schön.
Bis nächstes Mal
merle
What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist.
— Salman Rushdie