NVidia Drivers

It seems that a lot of GPU problems revolve around specific versions of drivers. Though NVidia has their own support structure, you can often learn from information reported by others who fold.

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Ricorocks
Posts: 475
Joined: Thu Aug 04, 2016 1:49 pm
Location: Georgetown, Texas

NVidia Drivers

Post by Ricorocks »

I've noticed for awhile the news says: NVIDIA 375.57+. I've ignored this, as two machines have 376.48 & one has 376.53, and were quite stable or not stalling (yellow circle) for awhile. Today found 2 gpu's stalled, and one stall last week. I believe the 376 to be hot fix. Is the official release 375.57+ more suited/less problematic than the 376? Should I switch?
Ricorocks
Posts: 475
Joined: Thu Aug 04, 2016 1:49 pm
Location: Georgetown, Texas

Re: NVidia Drivers

Post by Ricorocks »

Re-phrase. 375.57 more advantageous than hotfix 376?
bruce
Posts: 20910
Joined: Thu Nov 29, 2007 10:13 pm
Location: So. Cal.

Re: NVidia Drivers

Post by bruce »

The 375.xx series has morphed into the 376.xx series. NVidia adopted and interpretation which causes an OpenCL error periodically. A (hot-)fix for the problem wasn't introduced until 376.48 but this caused a (small?) performance reduction. FAH is working on a change to FAHCore_21 that is a second work-around for the problem, thereby avoiding the hot-fix and hopefully also avoiding some or all of the loss in performance.

If your hardware can run with drivers older than 375, you'll probably avoid both the crashes and the performance degradation but they don't support the latest hardware. Things are still in flux and there are no universal answers yet.

It should be noted that the AMD OpenCL implementation works fine with the preexisting FAHCore_21, so it's not clear if a unified interpretation of the OpenCL specification exists.

Topic closed.
For more details, there's a 20 page topic here:
Subject: WARNING Do not upgrade to 375/376.xx drivers (for xx<48)
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