Fermi/Kepler (non-GK110) and newer drivers

[n_w95482]

A lot of this may seem anecdotal but I figured I'd post about it anyway since I haven't seen much recent discussion about it. I haven't scrutinized down to the TPF-per-project level in a while, hehe.

Anywho...

For quite a while, I kept my main PC on the 327.23 driver so my GTX 680 would fold quickly. Last summer, I finally updated to 353.30 to take advantage of newer game support and performance optimizations (in particular, the DX11 streamlining they did way back in the early-mid 330 drivers). I was hoping by then, I would get lucky and rarely get assigned work using older cores. I was wrong. It was occasional for the most part, but recently I was getting a lot of core 17 WUs that ran very badly (usually around 28k PPD). Another thing that I noticed was that core 18 and 21 work slowly dropped in output, going from 90-110k down to 75-80k (I'm guessing newer versions of those cores; I haven't been paying enough attention to them to know for sure).

A couple of weeks ago, I decided to try a newer driver in the slim chance that something would be fixed. I installed the 361.75 driver and let it crank away for a few days. So far, everything appears to be working perfectly! Core 17 is WAY better than it was before (as I write this, the 680 is working on project 10466 at right around 97k PPD). 18 and 21 PPD has gone up as well, frequently over 100k (highest I've seen so far is about 113k). I haven't looked with core 18 or 21 yet, but CPU usage with 17 is relatively low - 2.8-4.4% on a 12-thread CPU, instead of sitting at 8.3% (one whole thread).

At the same time, I updated my spare PC's driver from 358.50 to 361.75. It's running a GTX 570. For the most part, its PPD was in the low to high 30k range. Since updating, it has shifted to mid 30s to high 40s (peak so far is *just* under 50k).

A week or so later, I decided to update my HTPC's driver as well, from 359.00. By then, 361.91 had been released. I decided to try it, rather than sticking with 361.75. Folding performance with its GTX 460 1 GB has increased from the high teens to low-mid 20k. I might switch to 361.75 though as I've had occasional video playback issues with Kodi and YouTube that I didn't have prior to the update.

Oh yeah, I forgot to add OS info - the main PC is running Windows 8.1 (probably will upgrade to 10 tonight), the spare is running Windows 7 SP1, and the HTPC is running Windows 10.

Screenshot of the 680 in action: http://imgur.com/W2FX1P5

[leggazoid]

I had the same improvements with Linux and GTX 770 & GTX660 cards.

NVIDIA 361.xx and above is working full speed on Core 17 now. How can we get the installation FAQs updated to reflect this?

[7im]

...snip...

How can we get the installation FAQs updated to reflect this?

All you have to do is ask.

"Please update the installation guides with this new driver recommendation."

And the web minions will see the request and make any changes as needed.