Driver versions - what to use and how to change?

[Global BTC]

I'm very confused by the overall driver version thing. Is there a post (on this forum or somewhere else) that clarifies driver versions, OpenCL versions, which versions to use, how to change them and so on? I'm using Windows 7, but I guess a post describing this for all the popular operating systems would be very useful.

[1715183580]

1715183580

[1715183580]

1715183580

[John (John K.)]

First state your GPU make and model, and your mining program. That'll be easier to discern what to use.
And no, there isn't a post so far, but you can take a look at bitcoin mining wiki to see what people use to achieve their hashing speeds. At least that's what I do for a start

[Global BTC]

OK, I have two HD5850's, one is from Sapphire and the other one is from Club3D. I mine using cgminer on Windows 7 64.

I currently use cgminer 2.0.8, when I tried updating I lost a whole lot of performance. They told me it's because I've also updated my drivers and the old version of cgminer is using the old version of the drivers. And that's why I started this thread.

[juggalodarkclow]

i'm running 6 sapphire radeon 5830's on win7 x64 with cat 11.11 and the latest version of cgminer and they're averaging around 300 mh/s each

[-ck]

Be aware that the prime determinant of performance is the AMD APP SDK you have installed and not the driver. However when you install a driver, it usually installs an SDK at the same time unless you choose a custom install and choose not to install it. When running cgminer, the other thing is that the performance is linked to the SDK that was installed the very first time you ran cgminer as it generates .bin files that are used from then on. So if you change your SDK, you must delete the .bin files generated by cgminer to get the changed performance.