New Driver: AMD Catalyst Omega Driver

merle van osdol
merle van osdol
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RE: Hello! My ASUS Matrix

Quote:
Hello!
My ASUS Matrix 280X Platinum runnig faster with Omega driver. My results were 1 hour 35 minutes with Catalyst 13.12. Omega 14.12, WU is running 1 hour 22 minutes.

Thanks Sale,
I am very interested in this thread and the new Omega driver. I just want to hear from others and make sure this is the way to go. You see I am a chicken when it comes to changes to my boinc work. :-)

Keep the news coming. Thanks!

merle

What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist.

— Salman Rushdie

Sid
Sid
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Same with my 280x.

Same with my 280x.

disturber
disturber
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Any thoughts why the 7970

Any thoughts why the 7970 card would be slower with the new drivers? I though the 280x had the same chip in it. Is the firmware different?

What happens if I have a 7970 and a 280x in the same machine. I plan to buy one soon. Would this be a bad idea? What driver would I use then? Sorry for all the questions. The other option is to pair the new 280x with a gtx 970 in another machine. Not sure if that is a good idea either to get the best RAC without building another machine.

ExtraTerrestrial Apes
ExtraTerrestria...
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Yes, they use exactly the

Yes, they use exactly the same chip. I'm not sure what causes the observed performance differences, but one should always keep in mind that there's some native fluctuation among task runtimes, as well other noise sources. These can easily skew quick measurement by a few percent - so I wouldn't read too much into this (yet).

MrS

Scanning for our furry friends since Jan 2002

Sasa Jovicic
Sasa Jovicic
Joined: 17 Feb 09
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My Matrix HD7970 Platinum was

My Matrix HD7970 Platinum was five minutes faster@Persus than R9 280X Platinum with Catalyst 13.9. I tested them together (CF On/Off) and they are working without any problem. I did not test HD 7970 Platinum with Omega driver yet.

Sasa Jovicic
Sasa Jovicic
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I am testing my Matrix HD7970

I am testing my Matrix HD7970 Platinum with Omega driver and results are terrific! My PC is crunching 2X Perseus WU in 1 hour 15 minutes .

Gary Roberts
Gary Roberts
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I've been following this

I've been following this thread with interest for a while, since I have a number of hosts with HD7850 GPUs. Until earlier today, they were all using Catalyst 13.12 drivers. I decided I would try 14.12 in a new build.

Under 13.12 my HD7850s could complete 4 concurrent tasks in around 4Hrs 20Mins. This is for an Ivy Bridge or Haswell based host and a very basic H61 or H81 type motherboard. The CPU is always a low end Pentium dual core or an i3. Using an i5 or better CPU and overclocking it doesn't seem to make much difference to the GPU performance. I have an overclocked 3570K in a Z77 board and the GPU times (4x) are only 5 to 10 mins better - not really worth the considerable extra expense - for me anyway :-).

For today's build, I decided to use a newly released 2014.12 .iso of my distro of choice which happens to include the catalyst 14.12 drivers. Once I started it crunching, I could immediately see that it was going to be much slower than normal. I let it run 93 mins and it had just about reached 20% completed on all 4 GPU tasks. That equates to almost 8 hours for completion so I called a halt. I grabbed my 2014.05 liveUSB with Catalyst 13.12 and installed it on the root partition, leaving all the BOINC stuff untouched in the separate /home partition. The machine is now crunching again and the 4 tasks are crunching a whole lot faster - estimating around 4.5 hours for a full crunch based on the current rate of progress.

Sure looks like HD7850 GPUs really don't like the very latest drivers. I might try Catalyst 14.4 the next time I do a build. My distro is a rolling release (install once and update forever) but it does put out new .isos quarterly. I keep a complete copy locally of the repos and I branch my local copy just after a new .iso is released. So I have a 2014.08 .iso and a corresponding copy of the repos as of that date. I've never used it but it should contain Catalyst 14.4 or something close to that. The latest repos only contain 14.12. Once new stuff is put into the repos, they seem to move the old stuff out fairly promptly.

Cheers,
Gary.

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