@Alex: if GPU-Z reports a Cape Verde, something's definitely wrong. Not sure about BOINC's detection - maybe they just assign these names based on the HD77x0 version number. And I agree with FalconFly: shaders should not be allowed to disappear, without a firmware change. Otherwise.. I have no idea what may have caused your performanc eissue in the first place. Did you modify or change the firmware prior to detecting the performance issue and reduced number of shaders? Has the card ever worked as it should?
And I agree that firmware and drivers are unlikely to improve Einstein performance. But saying that they wouldn't be working on HD7790 performance any more because it's an old card is.. stretching it a bit. The Bonaire chip is among the very few with the updated GCN architecture, unofficially called 1.1. Even Tahiti on the "new" R9 280X is still 1.0. So actually they don't have any newer architecture than Bonaire. And they don't optimize drivers per card (except with hot fixes for "strange stuff"), but surely much more general. I'd expect most code to even work based on the architecture generation (GCN, VLIW4, VLIW5 and subversions etc.) rather than individual chips within one family. Here I'd expect only fine tuning to be neccessary, like tuning parameters to different chip configurations.
Hi,
THX for all the posts, they are really appreciated.
First of all let me say that I totally agree, firmware updates will not increase performance in 99.99%. I never tried it, tried only some finetuning to find the working ranges but always returned to standard settings.
The reason for my attempt to load a firmware was the fact, that a wrong amount of shaders was reportet. No attempt prior to that.
Maybe this is the price I have to pay for being a notorious 'beta-driver-user' with mixed hardware generations (HD 6xxx and HD7xxx in one system). But IF a beta driver has changed the firmware it should be possible to repair that with the correct firmware.
Did it ever work as expected? Yes, it did. But the last two months I did not pay attention to this system. Had some issues with not validating perseus wu's, switched this system to arecibo only, which gave better results. But I did not check the performance, had my focus more on my arm devices and my first steps with Ubuntu.
I've googled for similar issues on HD7790 but did not find anything. So I mean, the card is still under warrenty and I will send it back.
But remembering the posts from the dev's that a cuda 5.5 app is about to be published with an estimated 15% performance increase I like the idea to replace this card with a nVidia product, being back in the business with 3 types of GPU's in one system.
Need to make my decision soon, the multiuse will replace my mainsys in the next weeks. Win is at its end, start times increase more and more, needs to be setup completely from scratch. Cleaning and fan maintenance included.
But what I can tell all the guys asking about using a SSD in a crunching system:
After 2 years of heavy usage 16 hours /6 days a week with really heavy load including remastering and converting TBytes of audio-files, graphic apps and normal desktop usage including running BOINC I had not one single issue with my 120 GB SSD as boot drive and temporary drive for the audio program. I never use noname or budget devices.
You could check the card in a different OS install (could even be within the same PC on same spare drive), if you have the time. In any case I'd revert the firmware to stock before doing this, anD especially before sending it back as faulty. Which is the next thing I'd suggest after this relatively quick sanity check with another OS or PC.
And I'm pretty sure it could not have been a beta driver. AMD may not always have the luckiest hand in its software choices, but they're not completely mad ;)
Side note: same here for SSDs, no worries for non-extreme BOINC use. Using a 60 GB Agility 3 as Cache driver for my HDD sicne 2.5 years, including BOINC and the occasional game. Still 97% of write cycles left.
I uninstall the AMD beta drivers. They produce several BSOD when I run BOINC.
With the stable AMD drivers (13.9) I didn't see any performance difference for the BRP4G-opencl-ati client and I had a problem with the ATI PowerPlay/ULPS.
I managed to solve it with registry changes but when I use ASUS tool (GPU tweak) to change the fan speed on the GPU, I see the GPU clock to go back to 300MHz (instead of 1075MHz).
I tried to enable the windows Aero but did not resolve the problem.
Has anyone a more stable solution for the PowerPlay/ULPS problem ??
- physically identify which exact card & model & revision you have
- revert to original Video BIOS (RMAÃng a card with a wrong firmware will be rejected if you ever need it, most - but not all- BIOS files are available on the internet; just make sure it's 100.00% the exact right one)
- uninstall any such "tweak" tools like the ASUS ones (they usually cause more issues than help and are a healthy source of instability, plus for their nice looks they typically eat up alot of system resources)
- activate AMD Overdrive and Graphics Overdrive in the Catalyst control center
-> set manual Fan setting speed if needed
IMHO for as long as your card potentially runs off a wrong Video BIOS, no stability can be expected and nothing can be done about it with any Software.
- physically identify which exact card & model & revision you have
- revert to original Video BIOS (RMAÃng a card with a wrong firmware will be rejected if you ever need it, most - but not all- BIOS files are available on the internet; just make sure it's 100.00% the exact right one)
- uninstall any such "tweak" tools like the ASUS ones (they usually cause more issues than help and are a healthy source of instability, plus for their nice looks they typically eat up alot of system resources)
- activate AMD Overdrive and Graphics Overdrive in the Catalyst control center
-> set manual Fan setting speed if needed
IMHO for as long as your card potentially runs off a wrong Video BIOS, no stability can be expected and nothing can be done about it with any Software.
I am not the one with the bios update :)
My card has the original bios. I try to change the fan speed with AMD Graphics Overdrive with no luck.
@Alex: if GPU-Z reports a
)
@Alex: if GPU-Z reports a Cape Verde, something's definitely wrong. Not sure about BOINC's detection - maybe they just assign these names based on the HD77x0 version number. And I agree with FalconFly: shaders should not be allowed to disappear, without a firmware change. Otherwise.. I have no idea what may have caused your performanc eissue in the first place. Did you modify or change the firmware prior to detecting the performance issue and reduced number of shaders? Has the card ever worked as it should?
And I agree that firmware and drivers are unlikely to improve Einstein performance. But saying that they wouldn't be working on HD7790 performance any more because it's an old card is.. stretching it a bit. The Bonaire chip is among the very few with the updated GCN architecture, unofficially called 1.1. Even Tahiti on the "new" R9 280X is still 1.0. So actually they don't have any newer architecture than Bonaire. And they don't optimize drivers per card (except with hot fixes for "strange stuff"), but surely much more general. I'd expect most code to even work based on the architecture generation (GCN, VLIW4, VLIW5 and subversions etc.) rather than individual chips within one family. Here I'd expect only fine tuning to be neccessary, like tuning parameters to different chip configurations.
MrS
Scanning for our furry friends since Jan 2002
Hi, THX for all the posts,
)
Hi,
THX for all the posts, they are really appreciated.
First of all let me say that I totally agree, firmware updates will not increase performance in 99.99%. I never tried it, tried only some finetuning to find the working ranges but always returned to standard settings.
The reason for my attempt to load a firmware was the fact, that a wrong amount of shaders was reportet. No attempt prior to that.
Maybe this is the price I have to pay for being a notorious 'beta-driver-user' with mixed hardware generations (HD 6xxx and HD7xxx in one system). But IF a beta driver has changed the firmware it should be possible to repair that with the correct firmware.
Did it ever work as expected? Yes, it did. But the last two months I did not pay attention to this system. Had some issues with not validating perseus wu's, switched this system to arecibo only, which gave better results. But I did not check the performance, had my focus more on my arm devices and my first steps with Ubuntu.
I've googled for similar issues on HD7790 but did not find anything. So I mean, the card is still under warrenty and I will send it back.
But remembering the posts from the dev's that a cuda 5.5 app is about to be published with an estimated 15% performance increase I like the idea to replace this card with a nVidia product, being back in the business with 3 types of GPU's in one system.
Need to make my decision soon, the multiuse will replace my mainsys in the next weeks. Win is at its end, start times increase more and more, needs to be setup completely from scratch. Cleaning and fan maintenance included.
But what I can tell all the guys asking about using a SSD in a crunching system:
After 2 years of heavy usage 16 hours /6 days a week with really heavy load including remastering and converting TBytes of audio-files, graphic apps and normal desktop usage including running BOINC I had not one single issue with my 120 GB SSD as boot drive and temporary drive for the audio program. I never use noname or budget devices.
Alexander
You could check the card in a
)
You could check the card in a different OS install (could even be within the same PC on same spare drive), if you have the time. In any case I'd revert the firmware to stock before doing this, anD especially before sending it back as faulty. Which is the next thing I'd suggest after this relatively quick sanity check with another OS or PC.
And I'm pretty sure it could not have been a beta driver. AMD may not always have the luckiest hand in its software choices, but they're not completely mad ;)
Side note: same here for SSDs, no worries for non-extreme BOINC use. Using a 60 GB Agility 3 as Cache driver for my HDD sicne 2.5 years, including BOINC and the occasional game. Still 97% of write cycles left.
MrS
Scanning for our furry friends since Jan 2002
I uninstall the AMD beta
)
I uninstall the AMD beta drivers. They produce several BSOD when I run BOINC.
With the stable AMD drivers (13.9) I didn't see any performance difference for the BRP4G-opencl-ati client and I had a problem with the ATI PowerPlay/ULPS.
I managed to solve it with registry changes but when I use ASUS tool (GPU tweak) to change the fan speed on the GPU, I see the GPU clock to go back to 300MHz (instead of 1075MHz).
I tried to enable the windows Aero but did not resolve the problem.
Has anyone a more stable solution for the PowerPlay/ULPS problem ??
As already said : -
)
As already said :
- physically identify which exact card & model & revision you have
- revert to original Video BIOS (RMAÃng a card with a wrong firmware will be rejected if you ever need it, most - but not all- BIOS files are available on the internet; just make sure it's 100.00% the exact right one)
- uninstall any such "tweak" tools like the ASUS ones (they usually cause more issues than help and are a healthy source of instability, plus for their nice looks they typically eat up alot of system resources)
- activate AMD Overdrive and Graphics Overdrive in the Catalyst control center
-> set manual Fan setting speed if needed
IMHO for as long as your card potentially runs off a wrong Video BIOS, no stability can be expected and nothing can be done about it with any Software.
RE: As already said : -
)
I am not the one with the bios update :)
My card has the original bios. I try to change the fan speed with AMD Graphics Overdrive with no luck.
Oh, sry misunderstanding then
)
Oh, sry misunderstanding then :/
@BackGroundMAN: I'd try the
)
@BackGroundMAN: I'd try the current MSI Afterburner, Sapphire Trixx or EVGA Precision. Maybe the Asus tool isn't up to date and messes something.
MrS
Scanning for our furry friends since Jan 2002