Catalyst 12.4 experiences

[EmSti]

Tried out Catalyst 12.4 on 2 machines. In both cases it slowed down both MilkyWay and Donate. The second GPU seems to run slower, real slow with busy CPUs, than with 12.3. Occurred on machine with 2 7970s and the one with 6970 and 7970. The 12.4 drivers seem even more dependant on CPU resources being free than 12.3. I have moved back to 12.4 and speeds are good again. Which is a bummer, since I have figured out that the problem I am having with MilkyWay crashing the AMD machines is the ati driver getting a unable to access memory error.

So what has been your experience?

[DrPop]

So you are back to 12.3? Hmmm...I wonder if all my problems with Donate and Moo the other day were due to the 12.4 drivers? I had just downloaded them the night before, and then I tried all the different stuff, and was getting the errors, etc, plus that is interesting - the 2nd card IS slower on the dual HD5870...maybe that is it?
Should I try going down to 12.3?

[EmSti]

So you are back to 12.3? Hmmm...I wonder if all my problems with Donate and Moo the other day were due to the 12.4 drivers? I had just downloaded them the night before, and then I tried all the different stuff, and was getting the errors, etc, plus that is interesting - the 2nd card IS slower on the dual HD5870...maybe that is it?
Should I try going down to 12.3?

Based on my experience, yes. My time differences were not slight. For MW, my 7970s usually do Wu in ~48 secs, this became 75 secs on the second card. On 6970 it was 200% increase in time. You can see the usage pattern was much different looking at GPU Usage in MSI Afterburner.

[Fire$torm]

Hmmm... OK I'll stick with 12.3 for the time being. Thx for heas up.

F$

[EmSti]

Update. Catalyst 12.4 is working great on the i7 and CrossFired 7970s. Heck, MilkyWay WU taking 41 sec or less. So I revisited the fx-8105 boxes and this is what I learned. The 12.4 work really weird on those boxes before on the opencl projects. So, I uninstalled 12.3 and manually removed the window\system32\amdocl.dll and opencl.dll (I think that was the right names). Apparently they don't remove with any of the uninstall and driver sweep removals. Installed 12.4 and made sure sdk was selected to install the newer opencl stuff. On the 2 7970 gpus box (BlackDragon) it still acted wierd and the 6970/7970 combo in hydra6 was just bad.

BlackDragon:
Besides the fx-8150 and i7 difference with FireDragon, the 7970s were not setup for CrossFire. I added the link and enabled the feature, which made it better, but niether card was running above 60%. The factory settings on the cards are different. I forced them to be the same and they took off like rockets. Both cards running above 90% and so far no weird behavior. So, CrossFire at same setting was the way to go.

Hydra6:
Tried Crossfire; that was a mistake you can't CrossFire 69Xx with 79xx. With 12.4 and non-CrossFire the GPUs have really odd behavior. The 7970 would run at 100%, but its time on a MW unit was over a minute, which is too long. The 6970 would only run at about 50% and take over 3 minutes. With 12.3 install but the leaving the newer opencl and amdocl install via the 12.4 install it runs better (49 secs - 7970 and 1 min 05 sec - 6970). Unfortunately I suspect this will still crash periodically.

I will see how this goes over the next day and then try out Donate. So, give the 12.4 a try. Your mileage may vary.

[Slicker]

FYI, nVidia is no better. I installed the latest (301.32?) drivers to attempt to get a CUDA 4.2 build for Collatz and my GPU kept goin back down to 300Mhz even when crunching. I had to rever to a CUDA 4.0 driver to get it working properly agian. I guess all they care about lately is games.

[Mr. Hankey]

Update. Catalyst 12.4 is working great on the i7 and CrossFired 7970s. Heck, MilkyWay WU taking 41 sec or less. So I revisited the fx-8105 boxes and this is what I learned. The 12.4 work really weird on those boxes before on the opencl projects. So, I uninstalled 12.3 and manually removed the window\system32\amdocl.dll and opencl.dll (I think that was the right names). Apparently they don't remove with any of the uninstall and driver sweep removals. Installed 12.4 and made sure sdk was selected to install the newer opencl stuff. On the 2 7970 gpus box (BlackDragon) it still acted wierd and the 6970/7970 combo in hydra6 was just bad.

BlackDragon:
Besides the fx-8150 and i7 difference with FireDragon, the 7970s were not setup for CrossFire. I added the link and enabled the feature, which made it better, but niether card was running above 60%. The factory settings on the cards are different. I forced them to be the same and they took off like rockets. Both cards running above 90% and so far no weird behavior. So, CrossFire at same setting was the way to go.

Hydra6:
Tried Crossfire; that was a mistake you can't CrossFire 69Xx with 79xx. With 12.4 and non-CrossFire the GPUs have really odd behavior. The 7970 would run at 100%, but its time on a MW unit was over a minute, which is too long. The 6970 would only run at about 50% and take over 3 minutes. With 12.3 install but the leaving the newer opencl and amdocl install via the 12.4 install it runs better (49 secs - 7970 and 1 min 05 sec - 6970). Unfortunately I suspect this will still crash periodically.

I will see how this goes over the next day and then try out Donate. So, give the 12.4 a try. Your mileage may vary.

Pro-tip... try using driver sweeper to clean out the previous installs before doing the driver upgrade. In the case of AMD, I use the AMD uninstall program first, then run driver sweeper, then install the new version of the drivers. This also makes downgrading much better as well.

http://phyxion.net/item/driver-sweeper.html

[EmSti]

Pro-tip... try using driver sweeper to clean out the previous installs before doing the driver upgrade. In the case of AMD, I use the AMD uninstall program first, then run driver sweeper, then install the new version of the drivers. This also makes downgrading much better as well.

http://phyxion.net/item/driver-sweeper.html

That is exactly the way I do it. :-bd The OpenCL stuff still had to be managed manually.

[Duke of Buckingham]

12.4 gave blue screen to me.

[EmSti]

Bummer. Did it atleast put a big bow on it for you? :D

[DrPop]

Any idea if there's any performance update for the 5870 cards? As old as they are I imagine they've about wrung every last drop of performance they could out of them :cool: but...I've got Puma running 12.3 right now, and I'll be putting it on something high paying like Donate in roughly 3 hours here! :D

[EmSti]

Any idea if there's any performance update for the 5870 cards? As old as they are I imagine they've about wrung every last drop of performance they could out of them :cool: but...I've got Puma running 12.3 right now, and I'll be putting it on something high paying like Donate in roughly 3 hours here! :D

I don't know know. If it is not currently broken, why take the chance. It will only wreck your weekend.

[DrPop]

... It will only wreck your weekend.

Haha! :)) so true, so true... :p You know me, I was just curious if they had eeked out any last bit of compute performance. I'm sure there can't be much difference on anything below the 7000 series card between 12.3 and 12.4 drivers...