AMD Catalyst 12.4 Released today. Thoughts?

[mc_lovin]

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.

[jwzguy]

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

[chiropteran]

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.

[mc_lovin]

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!

[ssateneth]

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.

[Diapolo]

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

Dia

[ssateneth]

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

Dia

Exactly what I thought.

[kwukduck]

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

730@11.11
674@12.4

Not happy with that...!

[ssateneth]

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)

[bitlane]

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

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 ?)

[Diapolo]

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

730@11.11
674@12.4

Not happy with that...!

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

[-ck]

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

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

[Diapolo]

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

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

[-ck]

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

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.

[daybyter]

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.

[GernMiester]

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.

[Gabi]

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

[Diapolo]

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

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

[jwzguy]

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

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 ?)

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?

[deepceleron]

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.