Folding Forum

Ok. I did the following:

1 - Run Atiman as admin (actually create an administrator account then log in and run from there)

2 - Installed 13.1 without APP SDK

3 - Installed APP SDK 2.7 (thanks FastFlyingVirginian )

Now my current PPD are still lower (were 3000 with 13.1 alone, 6000 now with 13.1+2.7 APP, used to be 8000 with 12.11 + 12.8 OpenCL), both CCC Overdrive and GPU-Z are now showing load oscillating between 65 and 85% which is prettier to see than 50%.
Not even close to the 99% of the previous drivers. But since I enjoy an hour or two of gaming in my free time, I MUST keep 13.1 because it shines on Far Cry 2, Crysis 2, Sleeping Dogs, Hitman: absolution etc etc etc...

Who knows...maybe this is due to the WU rather than the driver itself. I will wait to see if anything changes, but in my opinion the solution could be using somehow the OpenCL from 12.8. Any idea how?

do you suppose 50% is shaders only or if it includes the raster engine? Fah doesn't rasterize anything.

lordglenn wrote:
can you go into more detail exactly what your steps were, I just tried what you describe and im still stuck at 50%

im running win7 64bit and use a 7870. Also i have smp set to 3 so that i have a free core for gpu folding. Cpu is a i5 2500k at 3.8ghz.

Sure. I'm doing this on an i7-860 @ 3.5 Ghz with the aforementioned 7970 which had been previously running the 12.11 beta 11 drivers. SMP slot set to 6, all running on Windows 8 Pro 64-bit. GPU usage was running around 40% with this setup.

- Uninstalled Catalyst driver and Catalyst Application Profiles via Programs and Features in the Windows Control Panel; answered No when prompted for restart.

- Opened msconfig and set system to Selective Startup and Safe Boot, restarted.

- From within Safe Mode, ran Treexy's Driver Fusion and cleaned all files/registry entries related to the AMD Display driver, answered No when prompted for restart.

- Opened msconfig and set system to Normal Startup, restarted.

- From normal startup, installed Catalyst 13.1 using Custom install option - selected all EXCEPT APP SDK and HDMI audio driver (I have no need for HDMI audio in my system). System did not prompt for a restart after install completed.

- Installed Catalyst Application Profiles 12.11 CAP 2 and restarted OS when prompted.

- Installed 64-bit APP SDK 2.7 and restarted OS when prompted.

- Restarted FAH, watching the GPU usage in MSI Afterburner (2.3.0). The usage meter was back to the behavior I saw on Catalyst 12.9 beta (the last version before GPU usage dropped for me), i.e. the meter fluctuated between 92-99% instead of hovering around 40%, with the estimated PPD also returning to the previous normal range.

Well, have now upgraded to 13.1 and after doing some other OpenCL-related tests verifying things works atleast from the initial look of things as they should, have the following result for FAH:

Amd-7950, GPU-clock 900 MHz, memory 1250 MHz gets... 1498 PPD according to FAH-v7...

Just to rule-out a problem with the calculation:
Project: 11292, according to "currently running projects" this is worth 2224 points.
Time: 18 minutes and 30 seconds for 1% done.

=> 1110 seconds/% => 111000 seconds/wu => 1.28472 days => 1731.114 PPD.

So, OK, FAH-v7 is a little off in it's calculation, but it doesn't matter, 1.5k PPD, 1.7k PPD and 2k PPD is all crappy results.

On project 11293 (1835 base) I'm getting 8000 PPD on a 7950 at 1150/1500, which is what I used to get with 12.11 + 12.8 OpenCL. So, yeah...something is still wrong. Make sure you do the steps FastFlyingVirginian posted. When I first installed 13.1 clean, results on GPU were crappy (considering my overclock)...it most probably depends on the WU, but a 500% difference is symptom of something not working properly. F@H version is 7.2.9.

Also: a noticeable difference does reducing the SMP core to 3, instead of leaving it at -1 or 4. This is, apparently because one full core is required for the handling of the GPU tasks, at least that's what somebody told me here.

EDIT: I just got back home and I am having 21200 PPD total (13000 SMP, 8200 GPU). GPU-z shows an average of 99% load. This looks decent to me. If you have similar system it would be interesting for a comparison...

My config is 3570K @ 4.5 and 7950 1170/1500 (added 20 GHz to the core just for folding)...

fredsat wrote:On project 11293 (1835 base) I'm getting 8000 PPD on a 7950 at 1150/1500, which is what I used to get with 12.11 + 12.8 OpenCL. So, yeah...something is still wrong. Make sure you do the steps FastFlyingVirginian posted. When I first installed 13.1 clean, results on GPU were crappy (considering my overclock)...it most probably depends on the WU, but a 500% difference is symptom of something not working properly.

Yes, FAH is the only one not "working properly" with the v13.1 OpenCL-part.

I already mentioned "other OpenCL-related", so using an older, slower OpenCL just due to FAH having a broken application isn't an alternative for me.


BTW, have you tried running the new FAH-GPU-benchmark? It would be interesting to see how much faster your overclocked GPU is. See here and here

Yes, it's not for the drivers to be "fixed".
The fahcore NEEDS to be updated to conform with AMD's latest OpenCL implementation.

A member at OCN has modified the 13.1 drivers to work.
http://www.overclock.net/t/1323729/amd- ... t_19084047

Ever since I've started folding on my 7870 my PPD has been extremely low (around 900) and GPU-Z would report zero GPU activity during folding. I also have a GT 640 which gets about 5000 PPD and is always running at 93% usage according to GPU-Z. This was on modified 12.11 drivers. Since then I decided to try out 13.1 WHQL after using AMD's cleanup utility. After installing 13.1 with the old APP SDK v2.7 nothing has changed in terms of performance. I tried updating GPU.txt, clearing the configs and work folders before restarting but nothing has changed. I've even tried changing the SMP core usage to 3 (for an i5 3570K) after reading how AMD GPU's need at least one free SMP core though nothing has changed.
Currently I am running this on Windows Server 2012 x64 Data Center edition.
I also find it odd the GPU-Z has always reported that OpenCL is not supported on my 7870 but is supported on the GT 640. Also I find it odd that CUDA is not supported on the GT 640 according to GPU-Z. Both GPU's are listed as PhysX enabled (Hybrid PhysX) and having Direct Compute 5.0
Note that the 7870 has always performed this low, even before I installed the GT 640.

The good news is that GPU-Z 0.6.7 is out.
The bad new is that it still does not detect the GPU load on my HD 7770, with the 13.1 drivers (Win7 64-bit).
The HD 7770 is in the lower PCIe slot. It does detect the GPU load on my GTX 560 in the upper PCIe slot.

I submitted a bug report, but it wouldn't hurt if a few more were submitted.

IvantheDugtrio wrote:... I tried updating GPU.txt, clearing the configs and work folders before restarting but nothing has changed....

I wouldn't expect that GPUs.txt would make any difference. It's used by V7 to identify that it's an ATI GPU that can process assignments that are type :1:5: which isn't likely to change once the GPU first gets on the list.

Thanks FastFlyingVirginian & fredsat. I updated my drivers over the weekend from the 12.8 cats to the 13.1's and my gpu folding tanked went from tpf of 3.23 min to 14.3 min. I used AMD's new uninstall utility http://sites.amd.com/us/game/downloads/ ... ility.aspx rebooted then did a custom install of the 13.1's unselecting the app-sk and installed the app-sk 2.7 after. GPU utilization is back up to 99% only 20 some seconds slower now but still under 4 min tpf
I'm running an all amd system on Win 7 64x Home premium, AMD's uninstalled left all my chipset drivers intact..pretty important since I'm running raid. Don't use this if your running Windows 8 and have an AMD motherboard...especially if your running raid. It should be safe enough if your using Intel and the only AMD product is the graphics card. Some users reported a blank screen when using eyefinity probably best to just use your main monitor before running it. When I ran it the uninstaller appeared to hang once I pressed finish but ctrl-alt-del and selecting log off worked then I rebooted from there.. Also best to remove the AMD Caps 1st..I don't use'em myself but the uninstaller may not remove it.

AMD's 13.2 Beta 3 drivers now resolves the GPU usage issues 100%.

My 7950 went from 2.8k to 6.4k ppd. Did not have to use a custom uninstaller or anything. Sitting at ~95% usage right now, but it's bottlenecked by the CPU.

Drivers: http://support.amd.com/us/kbarticles/Pa ... river.aspx

Hello,

I have installed the new set of AMD drivers for my 6990 (Catalyst 13.1) and have been unable to get FAH to use 100% of my GPUs. It stays at ~30% and crashes into blue screen after a while. I have yet to reinstall FAH, which I shall try soon.

I'm using FAH 7.2.9 (or at least I think this is the latest version because I could not find any updates)

UPDATE: Just installed 13.2 BETA drivers which made my GPUs go from 30% 30% to 30% 85%. Will leave it over the next few hours to its thing to see if I get another blue screen crash.

I tried a 13.2 driver install with my 7970, but the GPU usage was pegged around 85%, instead of 92-99% as before. Uninstalled and performed a driver cleaning again, using the basic steps I detailed earlier in the thread, and reinstalled but skipped installing the included APP SDK and installed APP SDK 2.7 again. GPU usage returned to 92-99% and my PPD were once again back to normal.