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Hey I just noticed that the new drivers were released today.  I'm going to give them a shot right now and I'll let you know if there are any improvements.

I'm most interested in CPU usage. What OS are you running?

Basically no CPU usage w/ 12.4 and diablominer, windows 7 64bit.  2X5830.  6 core phenom 2, task manager settles at 0-2% cpu usage during mining but I'm fairly certain the 1-2% of CPU being used is due to dropbox and skydrive syncing in the background.

However, mhash seems to be down 10mhash per card, loss of 20 total compared to 12.3   But I am not certain this is due to the driver, because I swear that on the first reboot after updating I was getting the same mhash as previous, but something has changed since then and now it's 20 lower.

I'll investigate further when I have a chance to install the drivers on my other systems.

Stole this from [H]ard|OCP:

Windows XP support for the AMD Radeon HD 7900 Series, AMD Radeon HD 7800, and AMD Radeon HD 7700 Series

   - In addition to Windows 7 and Windows Vista support, Catalyst 12.4 now also introduces Windows XP (64-bit/32-bit) support for the AMD Radeon HD 7900, AMD Radeon HD 7800, and AMD Radeon HD 7700 Series

Super Sampling Anti-Aliasing: Level of Detail (LOD) Image Quality enhancements:

   - Supported on the AMD Radeon HD 7900, AMD Radeon HD 7800, and AMD Radeon HD 7700 Series

   - LOD Image quality enhancements for Super Sample Anti-Aliasing and Adaptive Anti-Aliasing through the AMD Catalyst™ Control Center for DirectX® 10 and DirectX® 11 applications.

   - Applications must support in game Anti-Aliasing for the feature to work (Forced on Anti-Aliasing through the Catalyst Control Center is not supported for DirectX 10 and DirectX 11 applications)

Morphological Anti-Aliasing (MLAA): Significant performance enhancements:

   - Supported on the AMD Radeon HD 7900, AMD Radeon HD 7800, AMD Radeon HD 7700 Series, AMD Radeon HD 6000 Series, and AMD Radeon HD 5000 Series

   - MLAA now operates up to 80% faster than previous versions

Texture filtering quality improvements:

   - Supported on the AMD Radeon HD 7900, AMD Radeon HD 7800, and AMD Radeon HD 7700 Series

   - Improvements have been made to the texture filtering algorithm (for both DirectX9 and DirectX10/DirectX11 applications) to increase the quality of rendered textures, with no impact to performance

----

I was having trouble with the driver, in fact after I installed it, my hashrates went down the shitter, and then uninstalling/reinstalling 12.4 was the exact same.  Uninstalling and reinstalling 12.1/12.2/12.3 was possible but OpenCL would absolutely NOT work for me.  Extremely frustrated, I googled around, and found a way to entirely flush AMD Catalyst drivers from you system.

Guide: http://www.bitcointrading.com/forum/index.php?topic=493.0

I just installed 12.2 again and everything is working fine, I can probably test out the CPU usage now but I'm just going to leave this thing mining for a day or so and not mess with it!

You didnt have to go through ALL THAT. OpenCL probably got pushed a new significant revision that adds functionality but at a performance hit (your hash loss). You just had to get rid of the amdocl and amdoclcl files because the driver uninstaller does NOT remove these.

On Windows we now have a new OpenCL Runtime version OpenCL 1.2 AMD-APP (923.1).

Dia

Exactly what I thought.

Yep, performance went down the drain... (W7x64)

730@11.11
674@12.4

Not happy with that...!

If it ain't broke, don't fix it. It's been proven for 2 years and counting that newer revision SDK's just causes problems, and using the lowest compatible sdk for a certain gpu is often the fastest for it (2.1 for 5xxx/61xx-67xx [could be wrong on the 6xxx range], 2.4/2.5 for 68xx-69xx, 2.6 for 7xxx)

How is anyone still suffering from high CPU usage ? What OS ?

For Windows users, this problem hasn't been a problem for a while (as far as I know).

I am running CAT 11.12 on all my Rigs with either SDK 2.1 (for 5xxx GPUs) or 2.4 (for 6xxx GPUs) and haven't had a CPU problem since I installed that driver.
I also retained all of the performance of the older SDKs as well.

Am I missing something ? (like perhaps a Linux problem I am not aware of ?)

I tested CGMINER with my DiaKGCN (-k diakgcn -v 2 -w 256) and at least there were no performance drops, so what setup, card and miner (+ settings) were you using for the tests?

Only difference with DiaKGCN was that s_mov_b64() followed by s_and_b64() got replaced with s_and_saveexec_b64() in one place in the GPU ISA code, which is indeed a saved instruction.

Dia

Thanks for the version number. I've added it to cgminer's whitelist.

You're welcome, currently I try helping the Bitcoin client as I was not able to significantly improve my kernel anymore :-/. I saw you re-added goffset support, were you able to fix the problems we had with it?

Dia

It's only useful when there are no vectors, and that's how I used it.

This is on Gentoo Linux...

phoenix crashed with it after some seconds. Tried it several times. Couldn't get reaper to work with it.

Gave up after some hours and went back to my old driver version. At least phoenix works again.

Tested 12.4 on my little 1Gh/s setup. Lost about 20Mh/s each on 2 -HD 6870's and about 10Mh/s on a 5870.

It's funny how at each new driver, mh/s goes down.
Maybe it's ATI way to tell us "use fpga"  :D

Each new driver requires own testing to see, if best settings have changed. Use different work- / vec-sizes, try alternative kernels (CGMINER has plenty of em ... phatk, diakgcn, poclbm or diablo) and post your results on the board.

Dia

Win7 x64.

I believe I tried 11.12 and while the CPU usage appeared to go down, it was not 1-2% it should have been if this problem was truly fixed. Instead it was like 15% on 6 processors, which is basically the same as 100% on one. And coupled with that the hashrate went down.

Are there instructions somewhere for an old SDK installation with newer drivers? Did you replace your openCL package? What is your CPU usage?

You can update the driver without replacing the current system OpenCL. Run the ATI installer, choose install, and press cancel after it has extracted the driver files to your hard drive. Then in Windows device manager, select "update driver" on your ATI video card, and browse to the extracted driver location, such as C:\AMD\Support\12-4_vista_win7_32_dd_ccc\Packages\Drivers\Display\W7_INF.

You cannot directly compare the results of the 2.6 OpenCL SDK libraries (included in Catalyst packages since 11.12 and 12.1) with previous versions. There was a major change in the architecture, resulting in the maximum miner hashrate being obtained at stock memory clock with four vectors and small worksize instead of underclocked with two vectors. See this topic. (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=56521.0)

Thanks for the link deepceleron. For my 5830s and 5770s all I had to do was switch VECTORS to VECTORS4 to get the max hash rate. The other params are BFI_INT, FASTLOOP, and WORKSIZE=128.

wazoo42 whats your memory/clock speed at?

After months of seeing threads like this where a new driver version comes out and people report horrible performance decreases, I have to say that I have never experienced the same.  For one, in the cgminer documentation it tells you to delete the *.bin file after every driver update or cgminer update.  I'm suspecting most people don't do that and report bad numbers, even the people who say "YEAH I DELETED THE KERNEL BIN FILES!".  Reminds me of people who call me at the help desk and go "YEAH, I RESTARTED 62 TIMES, STILL DOESN'T WORK!" and then you reboot their computer once and *magically* everything is working again.

The other thing I have to note is that I have found that driver versions don't mean shit when it comes to performance mining.  What really matters is the OpenCL DLL versions.  I don't care if you have Catalyst 1.1 or Catalyst 200,000,000.11923456.  What is your OpenCL DLL version?

I can tell you that I am running the OpenCL version that people are reporting in this thread on 2 5830's and a 7970 and my performance is exactly the same as 10 driver versions and 3 OpenCL versions before that.  If you were to believe everyone who says that each new driver release decreases performance, we would all be mining at 1MH/s by now.

             aggression    core      mem      hash rate
5830s       7                900       1000        290
5770s       9                925       1200        211
5770s       5                950       1200        207

12.4 drivers FUCKED ME OFFLINE for two days... Nothing good comes from them, Just wait for 12.5

You shouldn't have a problem pushing 5830's a little harder if you wanted to.  I am running 5 Saphire Extreme's of them 4 are stable at 1000core 300mem, -I 8 -w 256 cgminer (default version in BAMT) and those are steady at 322Mhs, however 1 of them will only do 920 core. Others go beyond 1000 core but mine crash when going above, from what I have seen and read 1000 should be reliable for most cards. No reason to have mem run that high, every watt counts.

Wow, why are you using such high memory clocks? That is sucking a huge amount of electricity and causing you to have higher temperatures and losing money. Underclock your memory and stop using shitty 2.6 SDK. Use 2.1. I get 294 mhash @ 900/355 using 2.1 SDK.

I've seen you QQ and bash 12.4 in about 10 different threads.  I'm mining on 12.4 (read: OpenCL 923.1), with a 7970 (and some 5830's), on Windows 8 -- which is supposed to not work at all.  Guess what?  It's been rock stable and faster than ever.  Also, 12.5 is already out, leaked beta downloads everywhere.

"i've seen you Quit Crying and bash 12.4 in about 10-" No, I referanced my own thread in the CG miner thread, In One other thread than that one, I bash 12.4, So This one makes three. Also, Im glad that your 7970 is working great with your windows 8 alongside the 12.4, Not all of us are running Such new components

I concur with 12.4, used cleaner to wipe old and install.  It would appear all is well until you happen to need OpenCL, installer says nothing about it like previous ones did, it should be installed behind the scenes but no cards are recognized for me, 12.3 was fine.

Time to roll back.

All I can say is that this driver was horrible with my 7xxx cards.  Cut the hash rate by half and I'd get an occasional BSOD (ATI related).  Used ATIMan Uninstaller and installed 12.3, was able to mine without any issues.  But I still cannot control the memory clocks on any of my cards with CGMiner or MSI Afterburner.   >:(

My only thought: Don't go into the light!

i re-acquired some sapphire 5830's and I've been running them at 850/195 @ 1.063v, 128 worksize, ~285mhash each.  ambient temp is probably around 100oF.  the voltage drop dumped them from around 67-68oC to about 63oC

Hmm thats a full 8 mhash more than what I would project for 1120 SP's at 850MHz.. Whats your OS/driver/SDK/miner/kernel/settings?