Suggested Hardware Tweak: Enabling Integrated Intel GPU for Performance Boost
Hi Everyone,
This is a repost (modified and added-to) from my thread here, FYI:
https://setiathome.berkeley.edu/foru...d.php?id=83125
I successfully enabled my motherboard's integrated GPU for enhanced SETI processing (and other tasks). Most motherboards come with a low-end Intel GPU (mine is an Intel HD 630), and they're surprisingly productive at SETI; they typically ship with this GPU disabled. I have twin NVidia TITAN Xp (SLI connected), and indeed most people have a separate graphics card(s) many times better performing than the Intel GPU.
However, the Intel GPU is there, and, it's quite productive, so why not use it? I have a thread here that discusses it, and results:
https://setiathome.berkeley.edu/foru...d.php?id=83080
I can post more results as I'm now even more impressed with it's SETI performance, as well as it's OpenCL productivity across the various applications I use (even games)--again, despite it NOT being my primary GPU (it's not connected to a display). So, for anyone keen to get as much performance from their PC for SETI (or any relevant computing task(s)), this may be useful. (A note for those who don't know: OpenCL is a set of drivers that enable computing on various GPU hardware; they're supplied by the GPU manufacturer; the Operating System (Windows, OS X, etc.) uses 'intelligence' to assign various tasks to the available GPU hardware, all GPUs are treated as co-processors; Multiple GPUs can work on tasks in parallel or work on completely different/independent tasks, this explains why you get an overall system performance boost (across many applications) with more OpenCL GPUs enabled.
3 Steps to enabling your Intel GPU as an additional OpenCL co-processor:
1. Enable (turn on) the Intel GPU in BIOS (this is not always easy as the menus are all different, as are the names for functions; mine was buried under menus that had nonsense names)--there may be associated settings we can discuss (mine, for instance, had a selection for how much shared memory to allocate, which I set to the max: 1GB), as well as other things.
2. Download the latest Windows drivers (from Intel)
3. Download the latest OpenCL drivers (from Intel)
Thanks to Jord (from the Seti@Home forum for helping me!
Overall system performance increase is about 3-5% for me (but that is relative to my twin TITAN Xp GPUs, so lower-end cards will proportionally show a larger percentage gain. My MacBook Pro (2018 model has an Intel HD 630 and an ATI Radeon Pro 560, and the Intel adds 11% to the overall SETI productivity. Pretty fun, especially if you have OCD (as I do) and wish to optimize your setup :)
Happy to answer any questions.
Cheers,
Mark
Re: Suggested Hardware Tweak: Enabling Integrated Intel GPU for Performance Boost
Unfortunately, I had to disable my integrated Intel HD GPU.
Windows 10 would occasionally Blue Screen telling me that igdkmd64.sys was the cause.
Goggling found many others with this issue.
The belief is that it was the Intel HD driver for the onboard HD GPU, that I wasn't using, was causing the issue.
The onboard GPU was supposed to be disabled since the BIOS detects a GPU in the PCI-e slot.
Updating drivers and running the sfc and DISM tools didn't help.
The only thing that keeps this from happening in my current version of Windows 10 is to actually disable the onboard GPU in the BIOS.
My Windows 10 is an upgrade from Windows 7.
Online users of clean installs of Windows 10 say they aren't having this issue.
I'm not prepared to start over on this system with a clean Windows 10 install at this time.
Therefore, I'll keep my onboard GPU disabled and won't be exploring this option.
It's too bad because this looks interesting and I do like to tinker with stuff. :-B
Re: Suggested Hardware Tweak: Enabling Integrated Intel GPU for Performance Boost
I did this with all my win/intel machines under win7. Worked great, although sometimes BOINC gets confused on how much work to request. You have to be sure to use the cc_config.xml option to tell BOINC to use all GPUs. Because the intel GPU and the GPU cards are so different in power, BOINC is supposed to just use the most powerful one be default. In any case, since I have moved on to server intel CPUs, this is no longer an option for me. And there appears no way to do this with Macs that have a discrete GPU.
Code:
<use_all_gpus>0|1</use_all_gpus>
"If 1, use all GPUs (otherwise only the most capable ones are used). Requires a client restart."
Re: Suggested Hardware Tweak: Enabling Integrated Intel GPU for Performance Boost
Quote:
Originally Posted by
zombie67
I did this with all my win/intel machines under win7. Worked great, although sometimes BOINC gets confused on how much work to request. You have to be sure to use the cc_config.xml option to tell BOINC to use all GPUs. Because the intel GPU and the GPU cards are so different in power, BOINC is supposed to just use the most powerful one be default. In any case, since I have moved on to server intel CPUs, this is no longer an option for me. And there appears no way to do this with Macs that have a discrete GPU.
Code:
<use_all_gpus>0|1</use_all_gpus>
"If 1, use all GPUs (otherwise only the most capable ones are used). Requires a client restart."
Hi Zombie67,
Regarding your Mac comment: All the Macs I have (and have had) have discrete GPUs. My current MacBook as an ATI Radeon Pro; other macs have and other GPUs. They all have had a low power GPU as well (most so the laptops). The latest version of BOINC and SETI@Home can use both (all) GPUs present. The last several models of MacBooks I've owned always had SETI compute on both GPUs simultaneously. Is that what you meant?
Cheers,
Mark
Re: Suggested Hardware Tweak: Enabling Integrated Intel GPU for Performance Boost
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Ron Shurtz
Unfortunately, I had to disable my integrated Intel HD GPU.
Windows 10 would occasionally Blue Screen telling me that igdkmd64.sys was the cause.
Goggling found many others with this issue.
The belief is that it was the Intel HD driver for the onboard HD GPU, that I wasn't using, was causing the issue.
The onboard GPU was supposed to be disabled since the BIOS detects a GPU in the PCI-e slot.
Updating drivers and running the sfc and DISM tools didn't help.
The only thing that keeps this from happening in my current version of Windows 10 is to actually disable the onboard GPU in the BIOS.
My Windows 10 is an upgrade from Windows 7.
Online users of clean installs of Windows 10 say they aren't having this issue.
I'm not prepared to start over on this system with a clean Windows 10 install at this time.
Therefore, I'll keep my onboard GPU disabled and won't be exploring this option.
It's too bad because this looks interesting and I do like to tinker with stuff. :-B
Hi Ron,
I wouldn't bother with a clean re-install either (monumental task that never feels at home :)
Are there BIOS settings perhaps that can be tweaked to resolve this odd issue?
Cheers,
Mark
Re: Suggested Hardware Tweak: Enabling Integrated Intel GPU for Performance Boost
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Mark Seeger
Hi Ron,
I wouldn't bother with a clean re-install either (monumental task that never feels at home :)
Are there BIOS settings perhaps that can be tweaked to resolve this odd issue?
Cheers,
Mark
I'm not sure anyone has nailed the issue down 100%.
It seems Win 10 wants to download a driver for the detected onboard GPU regardless of what you want.
Even if it is not being used, the driver faults with the system now and then.
About the only BIOS setting to tweak would be to disable the onboard GPU.
It may be drastic, but so far, it is the only thing that seems to stop the occurrence of the BSOD.
If for some reason in the future that I have to reset or reinstall Win 10, I might give crunching on the onboard GPU a try. :)
