There is an ongoing problem with CUDA tasks and the Clock Rates being dropped in Nvidia I've written it up and the problem is with Vista and Win7 both.

What happens, is the clock rate gets dropped to conserve power/heat etc. and never returns to high speed again. This always happens with DUAL Nvidia cards installed and seems only magic prevents it from happening on it's own most of the time. Doesn't matter what power settings are set, performance mode seems to help, but not totally correct it. Snoozing or Suspending tasks is a 95% guarantee the clocks with drop and never regain full speed again.

I've informed Nvidia tech support and the forums.


http://forums.nvidia.com/index.php?s=9f29a996e0ac9d6ea44a506f6631f805&showtopic=200414&pid=1237460&st=0&#entry1237460

8-)

Tex1954

As I've posted in reply to your identical post at SETI:

This problem has recently been drawn to the attention of the SETI CUDA developers, and is in the process of being reported onwards to other CUDA-enabled BOINC projects. It seems to be related specifically to the release of nVidia drivers which will support the forthcoming v4 release of the CUDA run-time support files. The central BOINC library code isn't yet fully compatible with CUDA v4: the problem has been overcome with test programs, and should go away with the next round of application releases.

Unfortunately, v3 and earlier nVidia drivers aren't available for the very latest generation of nVidia cards, but if you have a card which can run with nVidia driver 266.58, that should avoid the problem.

As I've posted in reply to your identical post at SETI:

This problem has recently been drawn to the attention of the SETI CUDA developers, and is in the process of being reported onwards to other CUDA-enabled BOINC projects. It seems to be related specifically to the release of nVidia drivers which will support the forthcoming v4 release of the CUDA run-time support files. The central BOINC library code isn't yet fully compatible with CUDA v4: the problem has been overcome with test programs, and should go away with the next round of application releases.

Unfortunately, v3 and earlier nVidia drivers aren't available for the very latest generation of nVidia cards, but if you have a card which can run with nVidia driver 266.58, that should avoid the problem.

@ project devs:

It's been isolated to a CUDA task exit handling problem in the BOINC API library code. Eric Korpela (SETI@home) has a copy of the proposed (and tested) solution for evaluation, and is considering checking it in following testing and evaluation. I can put you in touch with the developer concerned, or pass messages, if you wish.

Thanks for the update. I had a watch on the Nvdia forum but never got an alert.

I have been testing the new Beta 275 drivers and have the same problems with them on 3 different pairs of cards...

Hopefully, we can get this resolved.

Again, thanks for the update!

:)

Tex1954

Has anyone tried out how much the downclocking affects runtimes? I caught my GPU at 405 mhz a while ago while it was crunching but the WU it was on seemed to be progressing at a rather normal pace. Could be it had only just downclocked though, pretty sure I snoozed boinc that day and it caused the downclock, just no idea how long it was before I noticed it.

Anyways, it'd be nice if it would be fixed in the next WHQL release. I need the new drivers to run games like the witcher 2 and dragon age 2 properly. Stupid thing is it stays downclocked even if I start gaming.

Has anyone tried out how much the downclocking affects runtimes? I caught my GPU at 405 mhz a while ago while it was crunching but the WU it was on seemed to be progressing at a rather normal pace. Could be it had only just downclocked though, pretty sure I snoozed boinc that day and it caused the downclock, just no idea how long it was before I noticed it.

Anyways, it'd be nice if it would be fixed in the next WHQL release. I need the new drivers to run games like the witcher 2 and dragon age 2 properly. Stupid thing is it stays downclocked even if I start gaming.

Does anyone know whether this problem has been observed with Linux CUDA drivers - like, perhaps, the 270.4119 release or the 275.09 Beta, both released May 20, 2011?

Does anyone know whether this problem has been observed with Linux CUDA drivers - like, perhaps, the 270.4119 release or the 275.09 Beta, both released May 20, 2011?

Still downclocks occasionally if I manually suspend tasks or snooze boinc with the 275.33 WHQL drivers. This is on win7 64 bit.

Does anyone know whether this problem has been observed with Linux CUDA drivers - like, perhaps, the 270.4119 release or the 275.09 Beta, both released May 20, 2011?

Amazingly this is still an issue. I uninstalled all Nvidia software and re-installed my old reliable 266.58 drivers, but now it's still downclocking randomly. So why is the driver that once worked without ever downclocking anything now screwed up? I think Nvidia is the new ATI with these horrible drivers.