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Message boards : Graphics cards (GPUs) : Beta driver 270.51 for Windows 7

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MarkJ
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Message 20837 - Posted: 1 Apr 2011 | 10:26:39 UTC
Last modified: 1 Apr 2011 | 10:27:15 UTC

This is under the beta drivers on the nvidia site.

It seems the two notable changes are the new Nvidia update (so it can check if newer drivers are available) and more importantly for us, it supports cuda 4.

Given my last experience with beta drivers I am going to wait until they have a whql version.
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Message 20840 - Posted: 1 Apr 2011 | 17:37:55 UTC

I'm using this version on Windows XP (32 bit) since midnight, everything is ok since then (I'm only crunching, not gaming.)

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Message 20850 - Posted: 2 Apr 2011 | 19:20:04 UTC - in response to Message 20840.
Last modified: 2 Apr 2011 | 19:21:19 UTC

Hi, I am also using this BETA, with Windows 7-64 bits and a GTX 295 and now it works perfectly. CUDA ver.4 also. Greetings.

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Message 20966 - Posted: 15 Apr 2011 | 3:57:06 UTC

Is there any information whether the new WHQL driver to use CUDA 4.0?

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Message 20977 - Posted: 15 Apr 2011 | 13:41:24 UTC

"If it works, don't touch" (freely translated from Italian, but I suppose it sounds much or less the same in other languages). Generally speaking, "do we have" to install every new drivers, even if the old ones work?
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Message 20978 - Posted: 15 Apr 2011 | 14:22:09 UTC - in response to Message 20966.

Kiler Hello: As I mentioned the previous post the 270.51 Beta driver using CUDA 4.0 on Windows 7, but the current 266.58 WHQL, NO.

The Linux CUDA 4.0 is already in use for some time. Greetings.

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Message 20982 - Posted: 16 Apr 2011 | 1:36:16 UTC - in response to Message 20977.
Last modified: 16 Apr 2011 | 1:38:02 UTC

"If it works, don't touch" (freely translated from Italian, but I suppose it sounds much or less the same in other languages). Generally speaking, "do we have" to install every new drivers, even if the old ones work?


The developers have said they will use Cuda 4.0 (skipping over 3.2) for the next science app. The new driver supports Cuda 4.0. You don't have to upgrade, unless you want Cuda 4.0 support. I tend to wait until they are out of beta testing (ie the WHQL version) before upgrading.
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Message 20996 - Posted: 18 Apr 2011 | 10:31:12 UTC - in response to Message 20982.

The Beta driver 270.51 adds support for the more recent cards (GTX 590, 560 Ti, 550 Ti) and for CUDA 4.0. A WHQL version should be along within a few weeks.

The CUDA 4 developers kit is presently at Release Candidate 2. This tends to get released after the supporting driver.

CUDA 4.0 will bring quite a lot for Fermi 400 and 500 cards, but the question is, what will increase performance for GPUGrid? Only the programmers would really know. Hope they can find a few tweaks.

Some of what CUDA 4 brings to Fermi's:

Easier Application Porting

Share GPUs across multiple threads
Use all GPUs in the system concurrently from a single host thread
No-copy pinning of system memory, a faster alternative to cudaMallocHost()
C++ new/delete and support for virtual functions
Support for inline PTX assembly
Thrust library of templated performance primitives such as sort, reduce, etc.
NVIDIA Performance Primitives (NPP) library for image/video processing
Layered Textures for working with same size/format textures at larger sizes and higher performance

Faster Multi-GPU Programming

Unified Virtual Addressing
GPUDirect v2.0 support for Peer-to-Peer Communication

New & Improved Developer Tools

Automated Performance Analysis in Visual Profiler
C++ debugging in CUDA-GDB
GPU binary disassembler for Fermi architecture (cuobjdump)

Spotted this,
"Support for XP on notebooks is being phased out and is therefore not available for this release". I guess this means the driver should still work for desktops, but this looks like it's the beginning of the end for XP.

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Message 20999 - Posted: 18 Apr 2011 | 16:00:24 UTC - in response to Message 20996.

Spoke too soon; today Geforce released a 270 WHQL-certified driver (270.61), but it's not yet on the NVidia site.

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Message 21000 - Posted: 18 Apr 2011 | 18:48:52 UTC - in response to Message 20999.

It is now!


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Message 21004 - Posted: 19 Apr 2011 | 10:10:34 UTC

Finally they released the certified drivers. Today, when I get home, I'll install them. Guys, inform please take effect as new drivers for your graphics card in GPUGrid.
Sorry for my English, I use Google - translator.
Thank you!

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Message 21008 - Posted: 19 Apr 2011 | 16:28:52 UTC - in response to Message 21004.

No issues so far with the 270.61 WHQL-certified driver.

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Message 21009 - Posted: 19 Apr 2011 | 20:04:42 UTC

Is there any information whether to use CUDA 4.0 opportunities in jobs GPUGrid?

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Message 21010 - Posted: 19 Apr 2011 | 20:17:37 UTC - in response to Message 21009.

It has no improvement in GPU utilisation when running on Win 7 64 bit :(

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Message 21011 - Posted: 19 Apr 2011 | 22:19:24 UTC - in response to Message 21010.

The apps would need to be cuda 4.0 capable before you would see any benefit.
Drivers by themselves rarely produce any benefit.

The cuda 4.0 toolkit for developers is still unreleased (RC2).
When it is then the apps will be tested and released, if they are faster and stable.

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Message 21021 - Posted: 20 Apr 2011 | 12:57:09 UTC
Last modified: 20 Apr 2011 | 14:53:31 UTC

Some of the Seti guys are reporting their cards down clocking when using 270.61 drivers. Something to keep an eye out for.

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Message 21022 - Posted: 20 Apr 2011 | 13:26:11 UTC - in response to Message 21021.
Last modified: 20 Apr 2011 | 13:27:53 UTC

The last time this raised it's head it seemed to be specific to card types. CC1.2 cards often downclock with anything past the 197.45 driver (win). This did not go away with any of the last drivers, so perhaps its just the same problem, found by new crunchers/people that have not updated for some time, or perhaps it affects a greater range of cards now.

In the NVidia control panel, Power Management Mode changes means you are stuck with Adaptive. I think what was happening is that some/many cards dropped down to their lowest clocks and just stayed there, no matter what GPU usage was required.
On at least one of my GT240's I saw clocks jump and fall all over the place without apparent reason, when crunching. Sometimes the clocks stayed high for some time, but mostly not. Totally unreliable.

A few posts on what gets downclocked and what does not would be useful.

My GTX260 seems ok on Win 2003 server x64 (equivalent to XP x64)

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Message 21028 - Posted: 20 Apr 2011 | 14:53:12 UTC - in response to Message 21022.

The last time this raised it's head it seemed to be specific to card types. CC1.2 cards often downclock with anything past the 197.45 driver (win). This did not go away with any of the last drivers, so perhaps its just the same problem, found by new crunchers/people that have not updated for some time, or perhaps it affects a greater range of cards now.

In the NVidia control panel, Power Management Mode changes means you are stuck with Adaptive. I think what was happening is that some/many cards dropped down to their lowest clocks and just stayed there, no matter what GPU usage was required.
On at least one of my GT240's I saw clocks jump and fall all over the place without apparent reason, when crunching. Sometimes the clocks stayed high for some time, but mostly not. Totally unreliable.

A few posts on what gets downclocked and what does not would be useful.

My GTX260 seems ok on Win 2003 server x64 (equivalent to XP x64)


The guy reporting it was running GTX480's. Not sure what OS he was running.

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Message 21030 - Posted: 20 Apr 2011 | 15:45:19 UTC - in response to Message 21028.

Thanks Mark,
I've just started to test my GTX470's (XPx86). So far no issues.
I'm using MSI Afterburner with a very slight oc, so it might be helping the card to stay at top frequencies (615MHz, default is 607MHz), when it's in use.
Vista and Win7 behave differently when it comes to power management.

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Message 21051 - Posted: 24 Apr 2011 | 21:34:22 UTC - in response to Message 21030.

NVidia Driver 270.61 WHQL, MCP nForce 15.49 : No problem with GTX460OC on Win7 X64 Pro.
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Message 21116 - Posted: 30 Apr 2011 | 20:56:03 UTC

30-4-2011 22:38:01 NVIDIA GPU 0: GeForce GTX 570 (driver version 27061, CUDA version 4000, compute capability 2.0, 1217MB, 1509 GFLOPS peak)

Running smoothly, however card is atm heavy underclocked because of heatissues. 2 Extra casefans should solve this in the near future.

Win7 X64 Home Premium SP1, 8-core Intel i7-2600 @ 3.40 Ghz, 4GB DDR3, MSI P67A-C43

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Message 21117 - Posted: 1 May 2011 | 1:15:18 UTC - in response to Message 21022.
Last modified: 1 May 2011 | 1:17:31 UTC

2 x GTX 570 getting throttled occasionally when OCed. ALWAYS gets throttled when boinc switches from GPUGRID to PrimeGrid...not the other way around though...interesting. Would cut the clocks by over 50%. Reboot and they'd come back up.

Tried taking the cards back to the reference clocks and the same thing would happen, immediately after switch from GPUGRID to PG.

Nvidia set to "prefer maximum performance" - still happened, all the time. This was not an intermittent problem, could be duplicated at will. Removed the 270.61 driver and reinstalled 266.58, no more problem, even when OCed. Obviously something is up with this driver and I won't be using it any time soon.

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Message 21118 - Posted: 1 May 2011 | 11:07:21 UTC - in response to Message 21117.
Last modified: 2 May 2011 | 0:04:43 UTC

You will probably find that prime grid runs with higher GPU utilization and has higher power requirements. Like some performance tests this forces the card to run too hot/use too much power and so the latest driver forces the card to down-clock. If you had a power meter you could test this at the wall with 266.58.

Perhaps the mechanism is more heuristic with the 270.61 driver, or NVidia have just added a PG exception to their throttle list.
If you only crunched for GPUGrid this would not be a problem, for now anyway.

Given the architecture I would have expected this to be more of a 500series feature, than Fermi-wide, but MarkJ reported similar findings on a GTX480 running Seti.

Anyone seeing this throttling with MW or another project?

- Well it didn't last, the 270.61 WHQL driver seemed to work for a few days but it started down clocking my Windows XP x86 systems GTX470. It then just stayed low, either 405MHz or right down to 50MHz, and no application I tried would get it to increase the clocks. Closing and opening Boinc and even system restarts did nothing to reset it. At 50MHz it was causing system instability and probably damaging the card. Apparently WHQL now means world wide beta test.

I suspect whatever updates are in the driver it allows it to check which processes cause the card to overheat/use too much power and then logs them some how and prevents them from using the GPU properly ever again. Maybe that update component is doing more than just checking for standard driver updates.

Anyway, I'm recommending that people stay away from 270.61.

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Message 21127 - Posted: 1 May 2011 | 18:15:25 UTC - in response to Message 21118.

I was actually on a 30 day mission to test my overclocked 570's using PG as the test. I've been fighting the heat since day one, but everything seems stable now. The 2 - 570's are now on GPUGrid full time. PG has been relegated to an old computer with a gt430. I'm still afraid of the new driver and will not be upgrading until GPUGrid requires it..

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Message boards : Graphics cards (GPUs) : Beta driver 270.51 for Windows 7

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