Folding Forum

I may take another look this weekend. I spent 3-4 hours trying to figure it out and it got rather frustrating. No other programs that use my gpu have an issue. I can game fine, I can run cryptominers, everything worked perfectly fine except folding.

Well, I decide to throw an extra video card in to see what would happen. Same result. No OpenCL, and the log said something like GPU's: 0, as if it couldn't find any. Strange.

But I felt more motivated, so I reinstalled Windows 10 like OP, and of course everything works now. FYI I didn't even bother getting drivers from Nvidia or AMD. I'm just using the ones Windows 10 provided. Folding at about 1.4 million ppd with an RTX2070 + RX570.

I really wish I knew the cause of this, though.

There are only a few programs out there that use OpenCL. Most games use DirectX and miners use CUDA. Good it is working now after Windows 10 reinstall. But it is really strange that your Windows 10 previous installation blocked even manual downloaded nvidia driver install for OpenCL.

(Maybe next time we get that issue we try some manual steps like looking in C:\Windows\System32 folder for OpenCL.dll and nvopencl.dll and try to rename them before nvidia driver install. To see if we get new or different ones)

To add to what foldy said, OpenCL is provided by khronos.org and redistributed by several other sources, including your GPU supplier. If you happen to have a GPU from NVidia, they distribute both OpenCL and CUDA which is a proprietary standard. If you happen to have a GPU from ATI/AMD, they have not licensed CUDA so support for OpenCL is REQUIRED.

FAH has a choice: Support OpenCL or support both. They tend to avoid the extra costs of supporting both, so in essence, OpenCL is required because ATI doesn't support CUDA and OpenCL works for either one.

You can download the OpenCL developer package directly from Khronos.org but the unanswered question is why Microsoft installed it on your second installation and didn't on the first one?

Interesting experiment I just tried since I've been folding fine for a few days:

The Windows 10 default driver for my Nvidia card was 416.34. Been running fine on that. So just a little while ago, I decide to see what happens when I update the driver to 417.01. I run the update, restart, and the Nvidia card shows status of "Ready" but it won't start. My AMD card started fine. I check GPU-Z and the AMD card shows OpenCL checked, but the Nvidia card shows it unchecked. So I go to my device manager and uninstall the Nvidia card and tell it to delete the driver. I restart, Windows 10 loads back the 416.34 driver, and *poof*, OpenCL now shows as checked for the Nvidia card. But it still won't start, and still says "Ready". So at this point, I uninstall FAH (but I keep the data), and reinstall. *Poof*, both cards are folding again. Weird, eh?

Moral of the story, if you get it folding, leave it alone...don't touch it for any reason! Like the Russian cosmonaut says in Armegeddon, "I tell you not to touch anything, but you Americans are bunch of cowboys."

Ugh, I just made the mistake of upgrading to nVidia driver version 417.94 and see I have no OpenCL support, even though, the PDF for the release mentions OpenCL 1.2 and experimental support for OpenCL 2.0. I'm downloading version 416.94 now and will attempt to downgrade to this version and see if it sorts it out..

Only been folding for a couple days now and nVidia broke f@h for me

Thinking of switching to linux but that's a topic for another thread!

EDIT: Downgrading to version 416.94 sorted out the issue, it appears version 417.x has issues with OpenCL on Windows 10

doctorlexus wrote:Interesting experiment I just tried since I've been folding fine for a few days:

The Windows 10 default driver for my Nvidia card was 416.34. Been running fine on that. So just a little while ago, I decide to see what happens when I update the driver to 417.01. I run the update, restart, and the Nvidia card shows status of "Ready" but it won't start. My AMD card started fine. I check GPU-Z and the AMD card shows OpenCL checked, but the Nvidia card shows it unchecked. So I go to my device manager and uninstall the Nvidia card and tell it to delete the driver. I restart, Windows 10 loads back the 416.34 driver, and *poof*, OpenCL now shows as checked for the Nvidia card. But it still won't start, and still says "Ready". So at this point, I uninstall FAH (but I keep the data), and reinstall. *Poof*, both cards are folding again. Weird, eh?

Moral of the story, if you get it folding, leave it alone...don't touch it for any reason! Like the Russian cosmonaut says in Armegeddon, "I tell you not to touch anything, but you Americans are bunch of cowboys."

Getting NV and AMD GPUs working together in the same machine on FAH has always been a pain because of driver component conflicts (with current FAH cores, OpenCL drivers). I always discourage this kind of setup ...

When Microsoft engineers make changes to Windows, they do not seriously consider what happens if there's more than one GPU -- especially if they need different drivers. I think that they tend to naively assume that if the GPU driver is able to display the desktop on your monitor, that's all you're ever going to need. Installing Intel GPU drivers with those from either nVidia or ATI can be as problematic as installing ATI drivers with nVidia. With a lot of tendering around such driver configurations can probably be made to work, but it's a lot easier for us to simply discourage that kind of a setup.

Well, I'm eventually going to replace the AMD card with either another 2070, or a 2080Ti if I'm feeling particularly bold. Then I'll be folding on only Nvidia, which may make things better for driver updates. But for now, as long as I don't mess with it, Nvidia and AMD seem to be playing nice with each other. I also paused Windows update on that box for 35 days, so I should at least get a good month of folding before worrying about any auto-updates hosing things.