FAH Client completely dead

[tulanebarandgrill]

I have had a working FAH Client on my windows system for several months. Yesterday it failed to start after a reboot. I think it was version 7.5.

Today, I installed the new 7.5.1 client and it also fails to start.

There is not any file in AppData/Roaming/FAHClient/logs. There is no process in Task manager.

Yesterday I found the command to run it manually in a log, so I opened a command prompt as Administrator and launched it. It said something about failure to get exclusive lock for GPU. GPU-Z says all is good with the GPU.

GTX 970 GPU
Intel 5960X processor (8 cores)
64 G RAM
Windows 10 Pro

System checks out on other GPU applications including Davinci Resolve, Adobe lightroom.

This is weird it just like i never started it.

I cannot post a log because there is no log. What to do in this situation ?

[bruce]

You probably have an nVidia GPU. You probably let windowsupdate nstall the latest Windows Update. For some reason, Microsoft believes that the ONLY reason anybody would want video drivers is to display their desktop (I'm being half sarcastic but also half accurate) so they UNINSTALL opencl.dll when they update your video drivers which means your GPU will not stop folding.

... and they don't mention it anywhere.

(I'm just guessing because it happened to me too.) It's really simple to fix: Go to nvidia.com and install their drivers for your GPU.

[tulanebarandgrill]

This is odd because whatever windows update did, it did not affect Davinci Resolve which is the other thing I use my GTX for (video rendering software).

[Joe_H]

Depends on what Davinci Resolve is using with your GPU compared to what folding needs. The usual problem with Windows updating the video driver is that MS does not supply a full package with OpenCL support. The update either removes that support or leaves the system with an incompatible version for the video driver it installs.

[bruce]

Right. FAH does not use the Video Rendering features of the drivers and my point is that Microsoft only tests if their installation works when rendering video. In their opinion, a GPU is supported for video only. I don't know how to convince Microsoft that they're screwing up those of us who use it for stream computing.