Hi, I recently installed seti at home on my desktop and because the PC had an old graphics card I was working on CPU work units only. I have now installed a Nvidia Gt730 after my old graphics card died, it is a basic cuda card. I ran the lunatics set up afterwards but there is not much of a speed gain afterwards compared with some of the CPU workunits. Do i need to reinstall the Seti at Home project within Boinc to get better advantage of the new card? I have not done that since the GT730 was installed. Thanks in advance for any replies!

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Hi, I recently installed seti at home on my desktop and because the PC had an old graphics card I was working on CPU work units only. I have now installed a Nvidia Gt730 after my old graphics card died, it is a basic cuda card. I ran the lunatics set up afterwards but there is not much of a speed gain afterwards compared with some of the CPU workunits. Do i need to reinstall the Seti at Home project within Boinc to get better advantage of the new card? I have not done that since the GT730 was installed. Thanks in advance for any replies!

Ok, let me see if I have this straight. You are running a GT 730 card using the Lunatics install? And you are expecting what kind of performance?

Uninstalling the Lunatics upgrade will mainly allow you to run your Seti processing on "autopilot" without gaining you much of anything. When you are on a Lunatics install you have to do any updates to the .exe etc manually. If you are looking to get the very best you can out of your GPU then you should probably stay with your upgrade and read all the included .txt files looking for clues on what to tweak. There are specific discussions on "laggy" video (slow response to keyboard/mouse by the video screen). But if you set things so the GPU processing stops when you start using your PC then you won't need to worry about tinkering with that.

You might find/install "TechPowerUp Gpu-Z" and see how loaded your GPU is.

According to the TechPowerUp database a GT730 has 384 shaders/cores and 8 ROP's. While these are certainly respectable numbers it is likely they are not going to generate very impressive processing times per work unit.

For instance, I have a GT 710 which is averaging about an hour and a half per WU. It has 192 shaders/cores. I also have two GTX 750 Ti's which are running anywhere from 5-15 minutes per WU upto a half hour on some. A GTX 750 Ti has 640 shaders/cores with 16 ROP's.

So if your WU results are coming up faster than my GT 710 but slower than my GTX 750 Ti then you are (probably) doing as best you can. Unless I am missing something.

I have seen threads discussing running 2 or 3 processes on a single GPU. I have recently gotten direction on that and if you want to experiment with it I will pass it on. There is no guarantee that your GPU will actually process twice or three times as many WU in the same amount of time. That is what you would have to experiment with.

HTH,
Tom

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A proud member of the OFA (Old Farts Association).

Provided you have used the "proper" Nvidia supplied driver, not the crippled one that MS will insist you use, there is no need to do anything else when replacing your aging card with a newer GTX730.
However, you have chosen to run the Lunatics fine offerings - this can be a bit of a challenge as you are responsible for making sure you install the correct applications for both CPU and GPU. Getting this wrong can cause all sorts of errors (tee-shirt is not very comfortable).
Looking at your computer it would appear that you may have the wrong driver installed - try rolling back to a 340.xx version as they are known to be stable with older generation cards like the GTX730. Windows will moan, so turn off any automatic hardware driver update option you can find in the control panel before you start the Nvidia driver installation, and KEEP THEM OFF.

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Bob Smith
Member of Seti PIPPS (Pluto is a Planet Protest Society)
Somewhere in the (un)known Universe?

Hi Tom and thanks for the reply. My main concern was that I had just installed the card without any thought that perhaps i also needed to update the seti at home software in some way after a hardware change within the PC. Some of the cuda work units were taking longer than the average cpu work unit but i now realise that VLAR work units take longer anyway. I also now understand that cuda workunits have a lot more work in them than the cpu ones so even if taking the same time they achieve more in terms of processing.
Thanks to everyone for the help, happy now that I have set it up correctly.

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Hi Bob, thanks for that advice, will check the drivers that came with the card, i know it has updated a couple of times since install.

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