13.4 AMD Drivers?

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

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monkeyclaw
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13.4 AMD Drivers?

Post by monkeyclaw »

Has anyone tried the 13.4 drivers with folding yet and confirmed it does NOT have the <60% GPU Usage cap, like the 13.1 drivers? To fix that problem it took me about 30 mins uninstalling and rebooting using ATI man...

Thanks in advance! Would love to use drivers from the past 6 months...
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mdk777
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Re: 13.4 AMD Drivers?

Post by mdk777 »

The drivers are not the primary culprit in limited FOLDING utilization.
With the use of OPEN CL, AMD cards are again seeing high efficiency in Folding.
However, the core is still in BETA, and has in fact now been suspended awaiting a new version using updated OPENMM code.(5.1)

http://folding.typepad.com/news/2013/03 ... re-17.html

I have loaded the beta 13.5 CAT and it indeed bumps up OPEN CL performance again a very small amount on LUXMARK (from 2080 to 2090 on default test on AMD 7970 {1400 at launch 16 months ago})

Consequently, I assume it will FOLD, but won't be able to confirm until the BETA CORE 17 trial continues.
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teaough
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Re: 13.4 AMD Drivers?

Post by teaough »

I'm running a humble 7770 and just installed the 13.4 drivers. GPU-Z (0.7.0) reports ~25% GPU utilization with project 11292. I was getting 90%+ while running the 13.1 drivers earlier this morning. Hmmmmm. I'm also running an 8 core FX-8320 (currently running project 7808) that's humming along nicely.

So, yes - it WILL fold but not with the productivity that the much older drivers had. :-(

Waiting for OPENMM 5.1 and hoping that that will be better.
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Re: 13.4 AMD Drivers?

Post by monkeyclaw »

Okay, thanks to you both. Would love to hear from more people that have switched over too.

Specifically, I have a 6970 on and older CPU (Quad Q9650 @ 3.8 GHz) and my GPU is most often my money maker.

I actually JUST learned about the core17 while I was googling around for answers on the 13.4 drivers, and I put the client-type beta flag in for my GPU slot, but I didn't get any Fahcore_17's :( I guess it would be because it is suspended, as you just said. I'll stick with my older drivers until it is reinstated. I am so jealous of those that were getting 40k PPD with their 7970s and fahcore17, I'm only getting about 8500 PPD with my GPU!
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Maxboy
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Re: 13.4 AMD Drivers?

Post by Maxboy »

I was stuck at 50% usage while folding with 13.1 (HD6670), in order to fix it, i just manually uninstall 13.1 with guide from other forum and install again 13.1 with SDK 2,7 to see if it would fix or not, but no, it still load at 50%.

so i just install 13.4 on top of that and vola! 90% load, awesome. (but i found that 13.4 doesn't have APP SDK option)
so again, what i did is install 13.3 without SDK(reboot), then manually install SDK 2.7 (reboot), then install 13.4 (reboot)
teaough
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Re: 13.4 AMD Drivers?

Post by teaough »

Just be certain to provide the GPU slot with one processor core - if you're running an SMP slot at the same time. My GPU load went from ~25% to ~90% once I did that. :-(
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Re: 13.4 AMD Drivers?

Post by Eagle »

Is there any way I can force FAH's client or server to download or provide me with core 17? I'm asking, because I did set "client-type beta"-flag for the GPU-slot, the CPU-slot uses only 7 cores (i7-3770 here) and therefore 1 core would be free for GPU-slot-managing - but in fact my GPU-slot constantly reports UNSTABLE_MACHINE (at stock clocks BTW). :(

Any help would be greatly appreciated! :)
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Re: 13.4 AMD Drivers?

Post by Jesse_V »

Eagle wrote:Is there any way I can force FAH's client or server to download or provide me with core 17? I'm asking, because I did set "client-type beta"-flag for the GPU-slot, the CPU-slot uses only 7 cores (i7-3770 here) and therefore 1 core would be free for GPU-slot-managing - but in fact my GPU-slot constantly reports UNSTABLE_MACHINE (at stock clocks BTW). :(

Any help would be greatly appreciated! :)
Please read viewtopic.php?f=66&t=23868&start=195#p241412
Sorry, but support for beta projects/cores isn't given outside the Beta Team forum per viewtopic.php?f=66&t=18031
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Re: 13.4 AMD Drivers?

Post by bruce »

Eagle wrote:- but in fact my GPU-slot constantly reports UNSTABLE_MACHINE (at stock clocks BTW). :(
Whether your error is caused by a hardware problem or a driver problem, you need to deal with the UNSTABLE_MACHINE issue before you consider any sort of beta testing. Beta testing is likely to have MORE errors, not solve ones you already have.
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Re: 13.4 AMD Drivers?

Post by Eagle »

Jesse_V wrote:Please read viewtopic.php?f=66&t=23868&start=195#p241412
Sorry, but support for beta projects/cores isn't given outside the Beta Team forum per viewtopic.php?f=66&t=18031
Besides the fact that I find your style of writing a bit offending (with respect to the one normally found across this board - which I was (correctly) reminded to respect a couple of months ago), I never said that I want to be part of the beta-team.
I respect their efforts and I consider myself by no means familiar enough with beta-specifics to apply for a seat among these great guys.

All I want is getting my GPU to fold (again) and since there's a thread within this (sub-) forum where they talked about getting core 17 by setting the beta-flag, I just wanted to achieve the same result. Sorry, if that sounded like I just wanted to cherry-pick, but leave out all of the other beta-stuff.
bruce wrote:Whether your error is caused by a hardware problem or a driver problem, you need to deal with the UNSTABLE_MACHINE issue before you consider any sort of beta testing. Beta testing is likely to have MORE errors, not solve ones you already have.
It's a brand new Sapphire 7970 GHz Edition which runs at stock clocks and none of the common benchmarks (including FurMark) could cause any type of hardware issues so far.
However I do know that you normally point out that FAH puts another type of load/usage to the GPU than "normal" benchmarks/usages do. But be rest assured and trust me: that problem occured on two 5870-cards before and even after switching the CPU, mainboard and GPU all together, the problem remains the same.
Again, the course of the other thread led to the conclusion "install this, do that, finally get core 17 by using the beta-flag and you're good to go". So, I apologize for misunderstanding the whole situation. The problem lies within core 16 which (at least for me) fails since I upgraded from a 4870 to my 5870 and persists on my newly 7970 GHz Edition. But since I'm bound to use a much newer Catalyst driver, I'm stuck with this issue and that's - pardon for the pretty straightforward words - a PITA! :-/
Last edited by Eagle on Mon Apr 29, 2013 10:08 pm, edited 3 times in total.
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Re: 13.4 AMD Drivers?

Post by PantherX »

Sorry to hear about your issues.

Since you have eliminated the hardware as possible cause, we can focus on the software now. If you haven't installed any specific GPU application, I would suggest that you temporarily install old driver(s) to see if you can get F@H to work. If you can, then it would point out that AMD Drivers could be playing a part in the issue. Moreover, you could try the FAHBench (http://proteneer.com/blog/?page_id=1671) and see if the stress-mode passes or not. It is based on FahCore_17 and is publicly available so you can easily use it on your system.
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Eagle
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Re: 13.4 AMD Drivers?

Post by Eagle »

PantherX wrote:Sorry to hear about your issues.
Thank you.
PantherX wrote:Since you have eliminated the hardware as possible cause, we can focus on the software now. If you haven't installed any specific GPU application, I would suggest that you temporarily install old driver(s) to see if you can get F@H to work. If you can, then it would point out that AMD Drivers could be playing a part in the issue. Moreover, you could try the FAHBench (http://proteneer.com/blog/?page_id=1671) and see if the stress-mode passes or not. It is based on FahCore_17 and is publicly available so you can easily use it on your system.
Right now, I'm running Catalyst 13.1 (with OpenCL from 12.8) and so far, after activating all options, FAHBench shows "benchmarking....2% done, estimate: ~7.585 ns/day". I'm going to leave the system on its own for the night. Maybe tomorrow, I'll have 100%..
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mdk777
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Re: 13.4 AMD Drivers?

Post by mdk777 »

Eagle,

Sorry you are caught in a catch 22 here. The established core does not like (preceded and hence could not anticipate)
the new core design of AMD graphics cards. As you note, this has been know for several years.

I always disagree with Bruce on this. Since the problem is caused by the old core...trying to fix an unstable configuration is an impossibility(using the old core...which is what is in fact causing the instability ... not the hardware).

AMD drivers for a new architecture are not going to retroactively resolve issues with code written for a previous architecture...One might wish that backward compatibility were universal and unfailing robust... bu we all know that in real life this seldom if ever the case.

So, policy is not to encourage beta testing with unstable hardware...so catch-22. No solution using this logic.

My AMD 7970 ran flawless on beta 17...but never worked on any previous core/driver combination..(well, one or two at 2000 ppd)

Anyway to actually answer your question instead of debating drivers and beta core policy:
... :lol: :wink:
Is there any way I can force FAH's client or server to download or provide me with core 17?
You can't get the beta core 17 now because it has been suspended. I assume that it will start again once they have implemented and internally beta tested the openmm 5.1 code.
http://folding.typepad.com/news/2013/03 ... re-17.html
Long story short...if you don't want to follow and test the beta cores...your best bet is to wait for core 17 to launch officially. All indications to date are that it will achieve something like a 100x improvement in AMD GPU performance....on nearly all recent AMD open cl drivers...

But that is just my observation and experience...things might change on the way to the show. :lol:
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Re: 13.4 AMD Drivers?

Post by Eagle »

Well, _that_ sounds like something to really look forward to. However, am I right that there's not even a "within the next 2 months"-ETA for core 17?

And since I consider myself pretty "naive" on the core-17-topic: why does it take so much time to test the OpenMM-code? That's not meant to be disrespectful in any way, but if it pushes ATI-contributors _that_ far (like you said), I just can't find a reason why it's not top priority "#1 AAA+++".
So, if you (or any other member of this great folding experience) can explain it to me: please do so - seriously, I'm begging for information about this, so that I can understand it with no question(s) left unanswered.

Again, thanks for your explanation so far. Together with PantherX's post (BTW: "benchmarking....6% done, estimate: ~7.527 ns/day" right now), I was able to make a step forward in understand the situation.
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mdk777
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Re: 13.4 AMD Drivers?

Post by mdk777 »

Well, my opinion is that the path of least resistance was always taken in the past. (Due logically to constraints of limited resources and getting the most done quickest) Since CUDA had depth of use and support, it was simply easier to support and for many years NV cards simply worked better.

It was not top priority until very recently when open CL established an Eco-system...a critical mass of users and suppliers, and code.

Once it became obvious that there were significant economies of supporting one core...which could be used on any graphics card, GPU, CPU, or any other computing device that supported the opencl language..it has now become a priority.
why does it take so much time to test the OpenMM-code?
Because this is a combination of software, and physics, and mathematics, and research...all at the same time.
There is always a lag of some years between when something is available, and when it is really utilized to its complete potential.(take sony and the ps3...games were really starting to utilize the hardware well after a year late)

The great advantage of having a standard, is that even when hardware advances rapidly, since the standard existed, it should continue to run...In theory. :lol:

My point :

When the core 17 launches with open cl 1.2 support...even if open cl 1.3, or 1.4 launches in the meantime, and AMD 8xxx series cards, or 9xxx series cards launch...they should still run the open cl 1.2 flawlessly.

Hopefully we will finally get off this constant delay and under utilization treadmill.
RE:

(BTW: "benchmarking....6% done, estimate: ~7.527 ns/day" right now), I was able to make a step forward in understand the situation.

Shouldn't take that long and should get better results.

Did you note all the requirements?

http://proteneer.com/blog/?page_id=1671
Requirements
MSVC 10 Redistributables
OpenCL:
–Windows
–Latest NVIDIA/ATI/Intel Drivers. Note that Intel OpenCL SDK Drivers must be from the 2013 Beta.
CUDA:
–CUDA 5.0 SDK
–MSVS 2010 Express
–Path to cl.exe defined in PATH environment variable
I had to install the MSVC 10 redistributables seveal times and reinstall the FAHbench subsequently to get it to work on my computer(AMD cpu ..so no experience with the INtel open cl sdk requirement). :mrgreen: :wink:
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