ATI/AMD and nVIDIA drivers, problems?

[[seti.international] Dirk Sadowski]

The current latest WHQL nVIDIA driver is 301.42.

At least for my system: WinXP 32bit + GTX260.

It's a well driver or already known problems?

Thanks 

[Jason G]

Going by the Top Hosts on Seti, pretty good under Win7, and works under XP.

With 260 it's a tough call, because it sits at a boudary between 'old-tech' and 'new-tech'  where the OS and Driver technology changes a lot.  You might obtain better performance sticking to Cuda 3.2 drivers, and these will be supported with new Cuda app releases built with Cuda 3.2 ... Or running Cuda 3.2 builds on new 301.42 driver could be just fine.

Jason

[[seti.international] Dirk Sadowski]

If I would upgrade from WinXP to Win7, I could tease out a little bit more performance out of my GTX260?

You could estimate how much? 1, 2 or more %?

Thanks

[Jason G]

If I would upgrade from WinXP to Win7, I could tease out a little bit more performance out of my GTX260?

You could estimate how much? 1, 2 or more %?

Thanks

Hard to say, since there hasn't been recent dual boot tests to see if the ~5% difference is gone yet on these older generation.  Win7 does use some optimisations internally that potentially make it faster, but these are very hard to leverage in code.  x41y (when ready) will give you a bit more control needed for these kindof cards to make it run the way you want on either OS, but in general I suspect Cuda 3.2 build on either XP or Win7 will be very close... and could be thrown either way by simple system settings / tweaks.

Jason

[[seti.international] Dirk Sadowski]

Jason, thank you a lot - you are the CUDA Master!

Maybe you know, is somewhere an instructions how to tease out the max. GPU calculation performance out of all PC systems?
Maybe OS, driver, hardware settings and so on?

Thanks

[Jason G]

To know about Windows settings/services for all the differnt versions,

Black Vyper's Website has a lot of useful stuff, with descriptions for tailoring to your needs (Pure crunching, games, or general use etc)

With hardware, it changes too quickly, but there are many sites dedicated to explaining BIOS setting etc, and how to tweak RAM... Mostly the extreme end can be a black art though, so extreme overclockign sites might be a good place.

For GPU modification, I like KingPiN Coolings's website... where there are voltmods & benching etc.  Mostly game & extreme cooling oriented, but many of the same techniques apply.

I've been asked to see if I can put something together for basic stability testing etc, which I'll probably post here &/or on GPU Users group.  The main difference with gaming Vs crunching is that with games some artefacts are acceptable, with crunching the acceptable rate is 0 per hour.

Jason