NVidia driver problems which cause computation errors

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Richard Haselgrove Project Donor
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Message 1296126 - Posted: 17 Oct 2012, 11:21:08 UTC

This post consolidates two known problems and their solutions/workrounds. I'll ask the mods to add any other similar issues to the thread as we discover them.

1) Sleeping Monitor Bug

Drivers affected: 295.51 (BETA), 295.73 and 296.10
Hardware affected: Any nVidia card connected to a DVI or HDMI monitor.

Symptom: If Windows power management blanks the screen, putting the monitor to sleep, the Cuda device becomes unavailable and SETI Cuda tasks run extremely slowly and/or error out.

Solution/workround:
Either (a) set Windows power management never to blank the screen
or (b) Install a different graphics driver, downloadable from http://www.nvidia.com/Download/Find.aspx?lang=en-us

2) Kepler cards unsupported

Drivers affected: All drivers from 304.48 (BETA) onwards.
Hardware affected: nVidia 'Kepler' - GT 6xx and GTX 6xx cards.

Symptom: All tasks end in errors when using the stock v6.10 'cuda_fermi' application.

Solution/workround:
a) Use an optimised Cuda application, where available.
b) Downgrade to the 301.42 driver - only possible on GTX 670/680/690 cards, not on newer releases like the 650/660 or their Ti variants.
c) Set an environment variable, as shown below.

The environment variable to use is

CUDA_GRID_SIZE_COMPAT

and it needs to have the value 1 (one)

You need to be running in Administrator mode, and you need to be running at least driver 306.02 (BETA) or 306.23 (WHQL)

Here's how to reach the setting screen:

Windows 7/Vista:



Windows XP:

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Message boards : Number crunching : NVidia driver problems which cause computation errors


 
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