Folding Forum

I had read the descriptions of low ppd for drivers past 327 for Fermi's in windows, but had seen nothing about the same problem in linux (xubuntu 12.04 in my case). Figured it didn't matter much until a driver past 327 showed up in the repositorys. A couple of days ago driver 331.20 showed up and I installed it on one machine experimentally.

I had been running driver and settings 304.116 or driver and setting 319 with no observable ppd difference. Also did not know if Nvdia driver numbers were the same in linux and windows. Still don't, but linux nv driver 331.20 does drop ppd . The machine I tried it on is a Q6600 @ 3.08 running a 3 cpu slot and a 650 ti @ 980 (stock) slot. The normal performance of the 650 Ti with a 8900 wu when undisturbed is ~23,500 to 26,500 ppd on a 965P with a v1 pcie graphics slot.

On the same machine and OS, undisturbed driver 331.20 dropped the performance to ~15,000 ppd.

I ran it about 8hrs and double-checked the TPF with the SMP2 calculator. OK....no sweat back to driver 319. That doesn't work because 319 auto-updates itself to 331.20 (in the versions tab in synaptic). My fix was to go all the way back to driver 304.116 and before rebooting highlight the driver in synaptic, toggle between description and version to update the versions tab...and then using the "Package" drop down submenu ....force version 304.116 and lock version 304.116 so the system doesn't try to update to a poorly performing (for FAH) driver in the future.

Three notes: None of this means anything if you are not folding on a fermi in linux.

There are doubtless more elegant ways to get this done, but it should work for all 50 people running a fermi in linux.

A NF4 939 Lanparty will run two 650 Ti's in linux, but the ppd is capped at 50,000 for the pair and the A64 at 2.3ghz or 2.6ghz is maxed out as in 100% on both processors and very hot. (informational)

I never questioned that the OpenCL problem of newer drivers is independent of the OS.
Hopefully Dr. Pande will adress this issue on the NVIDIA GPU Technology Conference (GTC).

Heiko

I recently did a clean reinstall of Ubuntu 12.04 LTS. As might be expected for a Linux novice, I have had a lot of trouble figuring out how to get working drivers installed. I first tried "sudo apt-get install nvidia-331" and got 331.20 but with my 650 Ti, I knew that was not the best choice. I then did a "sudo apt-get remove nvidia-331" followed by "sudo apt-get install nvidia-304" That seemed to work, but FAH still wouldn't run. Eventually I found that I needed to activate a package called "NVIDIA accelerated graphics driver (post release updates) (version 304-updates)" I still don't know if this is going to work.

I have not found a suitable repository of this sort of information so I'm reporting this here until somebody finds a better place.

I see mention of the 650Ti, but I thought that was Kepler architecture? It's codenamed GK106 according to the Wikipedias.

In any case, you seem to mention that sticking with nvidia's legacy release 304.119 generates considerably more PPD for the GTX650Ti than does the 331.20 driver?

Yes, that is a known issue with the drivers. For the time being, all non GK110 based kepler cards fold better with driver version 327.xx and earlier, by about 50%.

Excellent, thanks for the information 7im, and apologies for the quasi-necro bump

7im wrote:Yes, that is a known issue with the drivers. For the time being, all non GK110 based kepler cards fold better with driver version 327.xx and earlier, by about 50%.

What about Fermi, GTX-460? I have been running 331.20 since it was the latest in Ubuntu's selection list, is there any value in going backwards or for that matter forwards with the latest NVIDIA drivers?