Need CUDA driver

Steveplanetary
Steveplanetary
Joined: 23 Jul 11
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Topic 196646

I recently had to reinstall Windows 7, BOINC and everything else. My GPU is an NVIDIA GeForce GT 420. I installed NVIDIA graphics driver 301.42, same as before. But there was previously also a CUDA driver, as well as an OpenCL driver; now there is not, consequently the GPU is not being used by Einstein. Could somebody tell me where to download a CUDA driver? Please help.

Steve

"Remember, nothing that's good works by itself, just to please you. You have to make the damn thing work." Thomas A. Edison

archae86
archae86
Joined: 6 Dec 05
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Need CUDA driver

Try:

nvidia drives page for US english

or

more generic nvidia drives page

which may redirects to the first place on my browser, but might take you a better place in yours.

Steveplanetary
Steveplanetary
Joined: 23 Jul 11
Posts: 41
Credit: 32319229
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Thanks, but I downloaded

Thanks, but I downloaded 301.42 from NVIDIA, so the links didn't take me anywhere new. On 14 Mar 2012 Bikeman posted the following in the Technical News board, "Note that the Windows hosts with divers [sic] newer than 290.53 and older than 301.00 will still be blocked from getting CUDA tasks, as the problem is in the driver itself." So, I tried 285.62, but without success. When starting BOINC, the Event Log always says 'No useable GPUs found', so it's possible that GT 420 is now too low on the list.

If anybody else is successfully using GT 420, I sure would like to know how!

"Remember, nothing that's good works by itself, just to please you. You have to make the damn thing work." Thomas A. Edison

Jord
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RE: When starting BOINC,

Quote:
When starting BOINC, the Event Log always says 'No useable GPUs found'


That then means that the driver isn't correctly installed, or that BOINC isn't correctly installed. You did not, by chance, install BOINC as a service (protected application execution), did you? You can recognize this in those same start-up messages, as it then says that BOINC is running as a daemon.

Else, if in doubt, please post the first 20 to 30 lines of your start-up messages.

Steveplanetary
Steveplanetary
Joined: 23 Jul 11
Posts: 41
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I didn't think I had BOINC

I didn't think I had BOINC installed as a service (since I had gone down that dead-end road before). Nevertheless, I uninstalled BOINC, restarted, then downloaded and installed BOINC v7.0.28, making certain that I did so correctly. When I resumed E@H the 4 GW tasks restarted from the beginning, then BRP tasks and associated files started to download. Now my machine is using all 4 CPU cores AND the GPU. These 2 lines from the start-up messages tell the whole story:

11/25/2012 8:21:56 AM | | Running under account Steve
11/25/2012 8:21:56 AM | | NVIDIA GPU 0: GeForce GT 420 (driver version 306.97, CUDA version 5.0, compute capability 2.1, 1024MB, 8381379MB available, 134 GFLOPS peak)

Thank you Ageless and archae86!

"Remember, nothing that's good works by itself, just to please you. You have to make the damn thing work." Thomas A. Edison

Steveplanetary
Steveplanetary
Joined: 23 Jul 11
Posts: 41
Credit: 32319229
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I recall now that when BOINC

I recall now that when BOINC wasn't seeing my GPU, on that occasion I had installed it as a service. My reasoning was that on the third step of the installation, what it says about protected application execution is this:

"Run project applications under an unprivileged account. This provides increased protection from faulty applications, but it may cause graphics to not work with older applications, and on Windows Vista, it will prevent the use of applications that use graphics chips (GPUs) (A reboot may be required.)"

Since I wasn't concerned about graphics, and my OS is Windows 7, there didn't appear to be a problem. The wording is misleading. I will post a message about this on the BOINC message boards.

"Remember, nothing that's good works by itself, just to please you. You have to make the damn thing work." Thomas A. Edison

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