The Asus Maximus Formula board has more PCIe lanes, and supports PCIe 2.0. Both GPU's in that board are getting the full x16 lanes, but one is in 2.0 mode (the newer GT). The GPU's in the 975 based board only get x8 in 1.0 mode, but performance doesn't seem to suffer as far as I can tell.
..So with that you just launch multiple instances of GPU2, I keep reading how to do this but I am not grasping.
I don't think you can install the GPU2 client multiple times (since you can't change the install path). So I basically just cloned the two folders (one in Program Files, the other under user), and created a second shortcut in the startup folder pointing to the cloned files. Like this: (the blue arrows indicate the original setup for the first gpu)
BTW: make sure to delete the config.cfg, queue.dat and work dir in the cloned client folders, then launch both clients and make sure the config is correct for both clients (particularly the -gpu x flag).
Lots of good stuff in this thread- thanks for all the dual insights, Isevald.
I just can't let this thread go without giving some representation to the ATI camp- despite its comparatively lesser performance.
Currently, if you've got an ATI board, it seems you will get somewhat less than half the numbers of a graphically equivalent nVidia card. For example, If you're getting about 4-5000ppd on your nVidia 8800GTX, an HD3870 can do about 2-2500ppd.
Attached are some screenshots of my HD3870 riding on a GA-EP35C-DS3R with a Q9450 CPU clocked to 3.2GHz. I also use 4GB of GSkil PC2-8000s. There is not a lot of difference in the CPU usage. I do throttle the processor to run at about 90%. The thing that might be worthy of some attention here is that while I lose about 23% of my CPU capability to service the GPU client, my time per frame on the SMP client only went from 13 minutes to 14 minutes- less than 8% loss. That means, in this case, I've traded about 200ppd for about 2500- a decent netting. Sort of like having another quad-core running despite that it's not an nVidia.
So, if folding is important to you and you do have an ATI HD of this performance level or better, you might want to consider putting it to use.
LeonardoWake up and smell the glaciersEagle River, AlaskaIcrontian
edited July 2008
If not already done, you need to assign the WinSMP client to three cores and the GPU client to the remaining core. I assume you have, just a reminder in case you haven't.
If not already done, you need to assign the WinSMP client to three cores and the GPU client to the remaining core. I assume you have, just a reminder in case you haven't.
Actually, no. I haven't screwed with the SMP cores or their affinities at all. (For my purposes, I haven't run 2 SMP clients or affinity changer prior to this either).
What I did do is something that they seem to take into account quite a bit- and that is tuning the core priority and usage percentage (see attached). Actually, if I'm using 3 cores and small change, then, for some reason, the client is running the four SMP engines more effectively now than it did when I didn't have a GPU client.
Using this configuration, I've about doubled my prior production- though be it with an ATI card- and that seems to be pretty consistent with the best they're getting with the HD3870.
LeonardoWake up and smell the glaciersEagle River, AlaskaIcrontian
edited July 2008
Right, but ensure that your WinSMP client is three, and only three cores, that is, the three cores GPU F@H is not using. You can use Task Manager\Processes to set that, but you'll have to reset every time you restart your computer. A better solution is Process Lasso. It will automatically set affinities and priority every time you start a process, according to what you've set it to. It's interface is very much like Task Manager. It's free. Process Lasso
Understand that I really appreciate what you're trying to do.
However, I suppose I'm not getting the issue here. If I were to hazard a guess, the issue this addresses must apply to nVidias, because I'm hanging with the best results they've got for ATI 3870s without having to reset affinities or using 3rd party tools.
Anybody else having issues with serious performance impact? My 8800GTS (old version) is doing all right against the SMP, getting around 3700/day, but my new 8800GT is pulling between 2k and 3k, usually on the low side, and seriously affecting display. Webpages take too long to render, scroll speeds become stuttery, backspace even gets choppy. It hung TF2 for several seconds at a time repeatedly before I had to go back and just exit it to try and play. Did I miss some settings somewhere, or is this just the performance hit I'm going to have to live with? Also, RivaTuner doesn't work with these beta drivers, so I'm in Leo's boat, and I'm gonna have to request some assistance if I'm going to OC the 8800GT. Given the point output, I think I'd like to, but let me know if I've screwed up some settings first.
The GT, by the way, is on an E8400 system with no other folding running.
Side note: can't believe I missed these values for so long. I hit 15k the other day in 24 hours and thought it was an AMAZING convergence in timing to get all those points in; now I'm projecting 10k easy without the PS3's contribution. Very interesting.
Alright Snark I am your man on this one. I don't know if you say my acid trip issue thread I where I posted jacked up screen shots of TF2 game play, FarCry did the same thing. What it seems to be is RivaTuner when it is doing its software OC through the driver is causing a texture/rendering issue with some games. For instance TF2 and FarCry both do the acid vision to me while Grid(ported from 36) runs perfectly fine. I have to disable GPU2 to play games while allowing the SMP to keep its affinities and run in the background.
That 88 should be doing high 4 to just over 5k, I am on the 175.16 driver on the Nvidia website currently with the modded inf file otherwise it will lock your system after roughly 5 hours.
I just threw a 8500 in and will have ppds for it tomorrow, depending on out come might swap it out tomorrow for a 8600. Isevald's post explain everything easy enough to get it all up and running to have two cards folding.
....
Side note: can't believe I missed these values for so long. I hit 15k the other day in 24 hours and thought it was an AMAZING convergence in timing to get all those points in; now I'm projecting 10k easy without the PS3's contribution. Very interesting.
No ideas on my particular issues, then? I'm on the 177.35 drivers, even though nVidia's system information says I'm on 175.16 (no doubt a reflection of the inf file switcheroo) and I can't see any reason why this card is underperforming so badly.
0
LeonardoWake up and smell the glaciersEagle River, AlaskaIcrontian
edited July 2008
Have you tried uninstalling and re-installing drivers? If you are running 177.35, that is what it should show. 6.14.11.7735
Yeah I would uninstall your drivers and delete all the folders for the other drivers then reinstall the driver you want to use. Its a little annoying how much of a problem these drivers are causing.
0
LeonardoWake up and smell the glaciersEagle River, AlaskaIcrontian
edited July 2008
Its a little annoying how much of a problem these drivers are causing.
The first machine I installed 177.35 + *.inf was a bit problematic. The second machine was an instant success. Just go to Device Manger and uninstall the device. That works much better than finding the drivers files/folders and removing from there. Both machines for which I installed the drivers are WinXP SP3.
Leo, care to elaborate on what you had to do to get them installed correctly? They appeared to install correctly, but the driver's still working on the generic VGA adapter and folding of course says it can't find a compatible GPU. I'm gonna try reinstalling again, but if there are any special steps, I'd appreciate them.
Scratch that, finally got them installed after downloading a different version. Now we see if it still trashes my performance.
Oh, it sure does. Waaah. Guess I'll just stop it whenever I play.
The results, however, appear to be much better. With the new drivers, the GT is projecting around 4700ppd minus whatever gaming time I'll use it for. The GTS, on the other hand, is pulling 3800 without ever stressing the core it's assigned to over 10%. I don't understand :/ (Yes my affinities have been reassigned.)
0
LeonardoWake up and smell the glaciersEagle River, AlaskaIcrontian
edited July 2008
core it's assigned to over 10%
It should be pulling 23-25% on the single core to which it's assigned. It might be that your WinSMP unit is piggybacking. Check the affinity assignment for the WinSMP unit. It should only tap the three cores not assigned to GPU2. I'm sure you already knew that, but that's all I can think of right now.
Yeah, I've done that; the SMP processes (fah_a1 etc) are assigned to 0, 1, and 2, as is the fah.exe executable, while the GPU executable (FAH-gpu) and the actual core fah_11 are assigned to core 3. I'm gonna restart the GPU client in a minute and see if it picks back up, but FAHmon is still showing 4k ppd for it, so I don't know if one of those is wrong or this card is DYNOMIIIITE or something.
Looks like the current beta expired. There are console clients available for GPU folding now, though... I'm trying out the XP one now.
Edited: looks like a slightly faster (and I mean on the order of seconds) frame time with the console client, but I need the fine control that is the tray client right now so I can pause and quit at my whim for gaming. Might put the console client on the other box, though.
This is insane...
I got a 9800GTX recently (around ~200 for an OC'd one) and upgraded to vista 64, running an AMD x2 5600+ CPU with 6GB ram...
I put on the GPU folding client and fahmon is showing 5760ppd, my machine's power usage is only 230W
I don't think I could be more happy
0
LeonardoWake up and smell the glaciersEagle River, AlaskaIcrontian
edited August 2008
sgstair, it's some kind of magic, isn't it!
Tell all your friends then sign them up for Team 93! Yeah, baby!
Snarkasm, I have tried both the new console and system tray clients. I had a problem with one of my machines constantly failing to restart the client after system or client shutdowns. Nearly each time I would get the error, "...could not find cudart.dll..." The only way to get the client running again was to uninstall then reinstall. Definitely not a long term solution. That problem was only with the system tray client version. I switched to console and the problem immediately went away.
It's not just that... It's that I can still play games with it running and there are no apparent issues - it just keeps working (and folding in the extra gpu cycles) I'm pretty impressed, this is the sort of technology I like to think the future holds.
You got lucky then, sg - the tray client locked my system up beyond recovery when I tried to play a game. The GUI client makes TF2 stutter sometimes and generally lags my normal computer response time - makes switching windows, viewing webpages, etc rather slow and tedious.
GUI client lets me pause, and that's really all I can ask of it. I'm still happy with it, more or less.
GPU2 on the 8800GT; I can't watch a video or start any 3D accelerated app without the PC becoming unresponsive. Task Manager comes up after ~45 seconds and it takes another 2 minutes or so to kill the process.
GPU2 on the HD4870; I usually forget it's running. It makes WoW stutter sometimes.
I upgraded to vista along with the new card; not sure if that's why specificly but I've been seeing that it handles sharing the video card a lot better than XP - that may be it.
Come to think of it, my 8800GTS in the Vista box has been acting pretty nice. I attributed it to the far less than full-core performance, though. I wish I could figure that out.
Vista has a lot better IO path than XP, I've read a lot about the gpu core loading XP machines heavily, but it doesn't load Vista machines nearly as much. With my system and the 9800GTX I'm seeing about 25% load on one core due to the client, not really very much at all.
Comments
I don't think you can install the GPU2 client multiple times (since you can't change the install path). So I basically just cloned the two folders (one in Program Files, the other under user), and created a second shortcut in the startup folder pointing to the cloned files. Like this: (the blue arrows indicate the original setup for the first gpu)
BTW: make sure to delete the config.cfg, queue.dat and work dir in the cloned client folders, then launch both clients and make sure the config is correct for both clients (particularly the -gpu x flag).
I just can't let this thread go without giving some representation to the ATI camp- despite its comparatively lesser performance.
Currently, if you've got an ATI board, it seems you will get somewhat less than half the numbers of a graphically equivalent nVidia card. For example, If you're getting about 4-5000ppd on your nVidia 8800GTX, an HD3870 can do about 2-2500ppd.
Attached are some screenshots of my HD3870 riding on a GA-EP35C-DS3R with a Q9450 CPU clocked to 3.2GHz. I also use 4GB of GSkil PC2-8000s. There is not a lot of difference in the CPU usage. I do throttle the processor to run at about 90%. The thing that might be worthy of some attention here is that while I lose about 23% of my CPU capability to service the GPU client, my time per frame on the SMP client only went from 13 minutes to 14 minutes- less than 8% loss. That means, in this case, I've traded about 200ppd for about 2500- a decent netting. Sort of like having another quad-core running despite that it's not an nVidia.
So, if folding is important to you and you do have an ATI HD of this performance level or better, you might want to consider putting it to use.
Actually, no. I haven't screwed with the SMP cores or their affinities at all. (For my purposes, I haven't run 2 SMP clients or affinity changer prior to this either).
What I did do is something that they seem to take into account quite a bit- and that is tuning the core priority and usage percentage (see attached). Actually, if I'm using 3 cores and small change, then, for some reason, the client is running the four SMP engines more effectively now than it did when I didn't have a GPU client.
Using this configuration, I've about doubled my prior production- though be it with an ATI card- and that seems to be pretty consistent with the best they're getting with the HD3870.
Understand that I really appreciate what you're trying to do.
However, I suppose I'm not getting the issue here. If I were to hazard a guess, the issue this addresses must apply to nVidias, because I'm hanging with the best results they've got for ATI 3870s without having to reset affinities or using 3rd party tools.
The GT, by the way, is on an E8400 system with no other folding running.
Side note: can't believe I missed these values for so long. I hit 15k the other day in 24 hours and thought it was an AMAZING convergence in timing to get all those points in; now I'm projecting 10k easy without the PS3's contribution. Very interesting.
That 88 should be doing high 4 to just over 5k, I am on the 175.16 driver on the Nvidia website currently with the modded inf file otherwise it will lock your system after roughly 5 hours.
I just threw a 8500 in and will have ppds for it tomorrow, depending on out come might swap it out tomorrow for a 8600. Isevald's post explain everything easy enough to get it all up and running to have two cards folding.
Then you're gonna love this
Scratch that, finally got them installed after downloading a different version. Now we see if it still trashes my performance.
Oh, it sure does. Waaah. Guess I'll just stop it whenever I play.
Edited: looks like a slightly faster (and I mean on the order of seconds) frame time with the console client, but I need the fine control that is the tray client right now so I can pause and quit at my whim for gaming. Might put the console client on the other box, though.
I got a 9800GTX recently (around ~200 for an OC'd one) and upgraded to vista 64, running an AMD x2 5600+ CPU with 6GB ram...
I put on the GPU folding client and fahmon is showing 5760ppd, my machine's power usage is only 230W
I don't think I could be more happy
Tell all your friends then sign them up for Team 93! Yeah, baby!
Snarkasm, I have tried both the new console and system tray clients. I had a problem with one of my machines constantly failing to restart the client after system or client shutdowns. Nearly each time I would get the error, "...could not find cudart.dll..." The only way to get the client running again was to uninstall then reinstall. Definitely not a long term solution. That problem was only with the system tray client version. I switched to console and the problem immediately went away.
GUI client lets me pause, and that's really all I can ask of it. I'm still happy with it, more or less.
GPU2 on the HD4870; I usually forget it's running. It makes WoW stutter sometimes.
Both are XP x64
Oh well, I'm much more interested in an X200 at the moment to worry about upgrading graphics cards.