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JPinTO
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Nvidia 180.84 Drivers = 0% CPU Use under WinXP

Sat Dec 27, 2008 11:44 am

Like the title says, for those of you who are running Folding on Nvidia GPU clients under WinXP, if you upgrade your drivers to Nvidia 180.84 drivers or newer, then FAH CPU utilization goes to zero.

You can run the SMP clients together with the GPU clients if you so desire. I've got one of my 9800GX2 running 180.84 with both GPU's running and WinXp is using the odd % here and there. It's about time.

- JP
Last edited by JPinTO on Tue Jan 13, 2009 4:29 pm, edited 1 time in total.
 
JPinTO
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Re: Nvidia 180.84 Drivers = 0% CPU Use under WinXP

Sat Dec 27, 2008 2:44 pm

You may still need to have the GPU's on their own core, even though the core has almost no utilization.

On a Quad9450, I had no problems sharing a single 8800GTS client on the same core as a SMP client.

On a Quad6600, I had problems sharing a pair of 9800GX2 clients on the same cores as a SMP client.. but only with certain WU's.

So YMMV. One could easily setup a 6 or 8 GPU machine and only assign 1 core to all GPU's. This is still a huge improvement.

- JP
 
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Re: Nvidia 180.84 Drivers = 0% CPU Use under WinXP

Sat Dec 27, 2008 3:07 pm

This is a good update thanks JPinto.

I can't run two SMP clients(in VMWare Linux) and the GPU client simultaneously like I used to when I had an 8800GTS. I have had to stop running an SMP client on my system (Vista 64). If I load all 4 cores it slows down my GTX280's GPU client.

I also tried running the 8800 and 280 at the same time and it brought my 280's PPD down almost %50. I'm having issues :-?
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Re: Nvidia 180.84 Drivers = 0% CPU Use under WinXP

Wed Dec 31, 2008 10:39 am

Thanks Pinto Beany! I will upgrade after I get back from Tahoe!
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Ragnar Dan
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Re: Nvidia 180.84 Drivers = 0% CPU Use under WinXP

Fri Jan 02, 2009 2:58 pm

I just noticed this thread.

Is it the 180.48 driver, rather than 180.84 that you mean? I only see the former listed on their site.

I've had the GPU2 client slow down seemingly with every new driver, though that's actually a problem of Stanford's new core DLL's and bad WU's rather than nVidia's drivers. Anyway, I'll definitely give this a try since I'm running a 9600 GSO and a VMware'd Linux SMP client simultaneously which, if I could run them both simultaneously while doing certain other things, would increase my output. And it may allow me to stop doing my other workarounds, such as having to increase the GPU2 client to Normal priority.

Today, oddly enough, my highest producing machine, an XP-32 machine with an 8800 GT-256 card, just up and quit in the middle of the night after downloading a new WU. No error message, no nothing. It just stopped doing anything. I finally noticed it late this morning when checking its FAHlog file and seeing the every 6 hour unsent WU upload attempt after something over 8 hours of doing nothing. Stopping and restarting the service made it run again, and I still have no idea why it quit.

david00214: One thing I did that you might want to experiment with if the new driver doesn't solve everything is lowering the priority of your VMware process to BelowNormal after it starts running the SMP client. That helped my GPU client somewhat.
 
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Re: Nvidia 180.84 Drivers = 0% CPU Use under WinXP

Fri Jan 02, 2009 3:15 pm

180.84 is a beta release.
 
Ragnar Dan
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Re: Nvidia 180.84 Drivers = 0% CPU Use under WinXP

Fri Jan 02, 2009 5:28 pm

Saribro wrote:
180.84 is a beta release.

Ah. Makes sense. I'll try it anyway since the gain is worth the risk.

Thanks.
 
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Re: Nvidia 180.84 Drivers = 0% CPU Use under WinXP

Fri Jan 02, 2009 5:50 pm

Ragnar Dan wrote:

david00214: One thing I did that you might want to experiment with if the new driver doesn't solve everything is lowering the priority of your VMware process to BelowNormal after it starts running the SMP client. That helped my GPU client somewhat.


I forget, what's your setup and operating system? I'm running Vista 64. With an 8800GTS in my system I can run two SMP clients and one GPU2 client and they all perform at their max potential. When I upgraded to a GTX280 I noticed the SMP clients really interfere with it. Now I run one SMP client and one GPU2 client. Would be nice if I could get both SMPs running, but, admittedly, those things are so buggy nowadays I don't really feel like even running them anymore.

Changing gears. The 180.84 drivers seemed sluggish to me in Fallout3, so I ran the windows experience index. My score dropped to 5.8. I went back to the 180.48 drivers and am happily at 5.9 again. I was very surprised that my GTX280 would return a 5.8 and figured it must be a driver issue. IIRC the first time I hit 5.9 it was with my old 8800GTS(G92).

Yep just went back and looked at an old thread and I got a 5.9 with the 8800. Those drivers must have been really holding back the GTX280.
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Ragnar Dan
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Re: Nvidia 180.84 Drivers = 0% CPU Use under WinXP

Fri Jan 02, 2009 6:39 pm

david00214 wrote:
Ragnar Dan wrote:
david00214: One thing I did that you might want to experiment with if the new driver doesn't solve everything is lowering the priority of your VMware process to BelowNormal after it starts running the SMP client. That helped my GPU client somewhat.

I forget, what's your setup and operating system? I'm running Vista 64. With an 8800GTS in my system I can run two SMP clients and one GPU2 client and they all perform at their max potential. When I upgraded to a GTX280 I noticed the SMP clients really interfere with it. Now I run one SMP client and one GPU2 client. Would be nice if I could get both SMPs running, but, admittedly, those things are so buggy nowadays I don't really feel like even running them anymore.

I'm using XP-32, but the fact that VMware doesn't need as much priority as it normally would get would seem unchanged from XP-32 to Vista-64. It definitely helps speed things up, UI-wise, when also running the GPU client, for me. If Windows had a greater number of priority levels, things would work more smoothly, methinks.

Now that I've updated to the 180.84 driver, I don't notice any change, though. Of course, I already made changes to account for various things, so maybe undoing those would show the difference... which I'll eventually test. Probably.

When I had a Vista-64 system and ran a 9800 GT with it, that thing didn't perform particularly well. Turns out I should have looked for a different model since the one I got (for $97.75 during Newegg's 1-day 15% discount with another discount code and before the $20 MIR I also hope to get) only has a 1600 MHz shader. I OC'ed it a bit, but it only made it about +9% or something like that. Anyway, I also couldn't figure out a way to make the client run w/o putting the client in the Startup folder without hacking something up, and since it was a computer for someone else I didn't want to do that.
 
JPinTO
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Re: Nvidia 180.84 Drivers = 0% CPU Use under WinXP

Sat Jan 03, 2009 3:14 pm

I agree that even though the 180.84 Drivers do use little CPU, the priority of GPU client should be kept higher than SMP priority.

Those bursts where the GPU client needs the CPU can be hamper the client if the SMP core is running also

- JP
 
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Re: Nvidia 180.84 Drivers = 0% CPU Use under WinXP

Fri Jan 09, 2009 11:34 am

YOu know, it pays to pay attention to the details. I just upgraded the NVidia driver to 180.48 on all my folding PCs thinking I was going to see a change in CPU utilization and maybe a few more points. Doh!! :oops: :lol: :oops:

Same digits ........................................... wrong sequence. :roll:
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